SCANLOGS(8)

okay bestie, welcome to scanlogs straight from the InterNetNews Documentation — section 8, aka SCANLOGS(8). This is the little daily-maintenance icon that summarizes and rotates INN log files, and yes it absolutely has main character energy in your pathlog directory. 💅✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

scanlogs — summarize and rotate INN log files. periodt.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

scanlogs [norotate]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so scanlogs summarizes the info recorded in the INN log files that live in the pathlog directory set in inn.conf (peep newslog(5) for further details about these log files, iykyk). It's normally invoked by the news.daily(8) script, which handles daily server maintenance tasks. lowkey iconic.

It invokes ctlinnd flushlogs to close the news and error log files, rename them to add .old to the file names, and open fresh news and error logs; the active file is also flushed to disk, along with the history database. the way that whole rotation just works.

By default, scanlogs rotates and cleans out the logs. It keeps up to logcycles old compressed log files in pathlog/OLD (the logcycles parameter can be set in inn.conf). scanlogs also keeps archives of the active file in this directory. obsessed with a tidy archive moment 🎀.

It invokes tally.control if newgroup.log or rmgroup.log exists in pathlog (see the control.log entry of newslog(5) for more information about that). not me checking for those exact files 👀.

scanlogs displays the first 50 lines of errlog, news.err, and news.crit, if non-empty, and runs innreport to summarize the contents of news, news.notice, and perl-nocem.log, and to update the unwanted.log file amongst other things (see more information about that in innreport(8)). fr fr, that's the whole glow-up pipeline.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

Only one option is currently accepted:

• norotate — using this option disables the rotating and cleaning aspect of the log processing: the log files are only scanned for information and no contents are altered. If scanlogs is invoked more than once a day, the norotate option should be used to prevent premature log cleaning. no cap, use it when you're being extra and running it again. 🫶

🍓 FILES 🍓

See newslog(5) for the list of log files processed by scanlogs. that's the receipt, bestie. 🧾✨

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

Written by Landon Curt Noll <chongo@toad.com> and Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews. Converted to POD by Julien Elie. legends only 👑.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

inn.conf(5), innreport(8), news.daily(8), newslog(5), shlock(8), tally.control(8). go read them if you want the full lore, iykyk 💜.

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kisses, this was INN 2.7.4, dated 2025-05-09 — you just read SCANLOGS(8) and honestly? slay. 💖🎀