RTFM (Read The Fine Manpage) (logrotate)

Here’s another quick one.

I’ve been fighting this one for years, and never had the additional hour to figure out what was really happening.

Why are my logfiles rotating recursively? As in:

dovecot.error.log-20210101-20210201-20210301-20210401-20210501-20210601-20210701-20210801

I just never figured it out. I know I changed stuff around and was eventually able to get it to stop. But I never ran it down all the way to the end.

That’s a problem these days. So many things you don’t understand, and don’t have the time to fix the right way.

The answer turns out to be simple (and is now highlighted in my local copy of the manpage):

Please use wildcards with caution. If you specify *, logrotate will rotate all files, including previously rotated ones.

logrotate(8) (Red Hat Linux)

This means you, trying to shortcut logrotate to process all dovecot.* pages.