OK, so tell me if you think this is a graceful failure mode. I have some logfiles owned by a non-root user, with a non-default group (mail). Logrotate is running as that user. Logrotate wants to preserve the group, but can't (which is lame to start with, since chgrp manages fine). OK, I don't really care what group owns the log files I think to myself, on to more pressing things like writing rants in my blog. Some months later I notice that when the chown fails, logrotate compresses my file to zero bytes.. For those of you who slept through information theory, that means the file is toast.

The upshot is I have acquired an inexplicable interest in alternatives to logrotate. In no particular order, I noticed

• recycle-logs
• rotatelog
• skulker

Also, I learned about the rm command, which duplicates the functionality of logrotate, but is much easier to configure.