The problem with Linux logrotate is that it requires root access to modify its configuration files, and it sends a HUP signal to the process generating the log expecting it to restart and recreate the log file after it has been rotated. I didn't have root access on the server where I needed to rotate logs, and the HUP signal (kill -1) didn't necessarily cause the process to restart and recreate the log file rotated.
The following bash script (saved as rotateLog.sh) can be run as a non-root user and doesn't need the process to restart. It isn't as seamless as logrotate, but it gets the job done when your main priority is to prevent a log file from taking all the drive space.
In crontab, you would invoke it using:
<path to rotateLogs.sh>/rotateLog.sh <path to log file being rotated>
By default it saves up to 20 historical files and rotates if the size of the log file is greater than 20MB, but you can change those numbers as needed:
#!/bin/bash
LOGFILEPATH=$1
MAXLOGS=20
MAXSIZE=20480000c
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Not executed. No log file path passed as first parameter."
elif [ ! -f "$LOGFILEPATH" ]; then
echo "Not executed. Log file path doesn't exist."
else
PREFIX="${LOGFILEPATH%.*}"
EXTENSION="${LOGFILEPATH##*.}"
if [[ $(find $LOGFILEPATH -type f -size +$MAXSIZE 2>/dev/null) ]]; then
ls -1tdq $PREFIX*.$EXTENSION | tail -n +$MAXLOGS | xargs rm -f
NOW=$(date +_%y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S)
cp $LOGFILEPATH $PREFIX$NOW.$EXTENSION
cat /dev/null > $LOGFILEPATH
fi
fi
