Elegant Log Compression

Here's an elegant little one liner that I didn't expect to work. I partition pushing 99% space used, the largest culprit being daily log files. Hey weren't mine so I couldn't delete them, but I could compress them. But what about next month?

How about this:

cd /some/path/logs
for J in `ls *log?$(date +%Y)-*(expr $(date +%m) - 1)-*`; do
  ls -lh $J; tar -czf $J.tgz $J; ls -lh $J.tgz; mv $J /dev/shm;
done

The beauty of this is the embedded execution statements.

Within the backticks, are a pair of executions, one of which nests an execution.

This particular incarnation compresses last months logs. It shows the original size and the compressed size, then moves the file to a holding directory. On a real machine, I'd probably change the middle line to:

tar -czf $J.tgz $J; rm -f $J

Pop this in a cronjob and run it at "1 2 3 * *".