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bashloggingtail

Bash edit file and keep last 500 lines

I am looking to create a cron job that opens a directory loops through all the logs i have created and deletes all lines but keep the last 500 for example.

I was thinking of something along the lines of

tail -n 500 filename > filename

Would this work?

I also not sure how to loop through a directory in bash.

Solution

  • Think about using logrotate.
    It will not do what you want (delete all lines but the last 500), but it can take care of logfiles which are bigger than a certain size (normally by comressing the old ones and deleting them at some point). Should be widely available.