Feature Request: --savefirst option

[jlearman]

Please consider adding a "save first log" option.

I've often encountered cases when analyzing a bug I find I'd like to see information from the initial log, to make sure all resources were initialized properly or get a handle from an object created at system startup.

I believe this isn't difficult to using prerotate or postrotate, but the solutions I can think of would be susceptible to problems if other options are changed (for example, compression format, causing the names of rotated files to change.) Also, the only methods I can think of would not be efficient (e.g., always copying ${1}.1 if it exists) or might interfere with logrotate's assumptions (moving ${1}.1 if it exists.)

I've bumped into this in embedded systems so many times over the last 3 decades on different products at different companies, I'm surprised it's not a typical feature.

[cgzones]

I am not sure I understand what you mean by "save first log"; save before what exactly?

[jlearman]

When starting an application or subsystem, it logs. That's the "first log." Subsequently, due to logratate, the logging gets saved as (for example) log.1.gz.

Later, subsequent logging gets saved as log.2.gz and then log.3.gz. Eventually, when the max number of logs is reached, the oldest log is deleted.

The problem is that deleting log.1.gz removes the application/subsystem startup log, which often contains important information for interpreting later results. Dependencies are initialized, etc. This (and only this) log should be saved and never deleted (as an option.)