Question

I have a server program that I am writing. In this program, I log allot. Is it customary in logging (for a server) to overwrite the log of previous runs, append to the file with some sort of new run header, or to create a new log file (it won’t be restarted too often).

Which of these solutions is the way of doing things under Linux/Unix/MacOS?

Also, can anyone suggest a logging library for C++/C? I need one, regardless of the answer to the above question.

Answer 1

Take a look in /var/log/…you’ll see that files are structured like

serverlog
serverlog.1
serverlog.2

This is done by logrotate which is called in a cronjob. But everything is simply in chronological order within the files. So you should just append to the same log file each time, and let logrotate split it up if needed.

You can also add a configuration file to /etc/logrotate.d/ to control how a particular log is rotated. Depending on how big your logfiles are, it might be a good idea to add here information about your logging. You can take a look at other files in this directory to see the syntax.