Introducing "rot" - an ultimate stdout/stderr redirector and rotator written in pure python

Code tested with Ubuntu 11.10

Let’s start with an example.

p = subprocess.Popen(["spam_program", "-a", "-b", "-c", "100500"],
                     stdout=open('spam_out.log', 'wb'))

Consider you have some spam_program which will emit 20GB to stdout/stderr… This program is one of many(hundreds or even thousands) your test framework will start.

How can we handle this? The first thought is to > /dev/null, which is nice! Except that, the author of spam_program may want to grep(sick!) through this massive log file.

The other option might be to set logrotate each time the program is started, to rotate this huge file. Disadvantage of this approach is that you have to provide config file to logrotate and have permissions to restart the daemon, and yes it’s a daemon…

Or you can simply run a program using rot :) Rot is a zero-install and configure tool written in python.

You can find it here: http://github.com/lvsl/rot

Here is example usage:

$rot --stdout-limit 100M \
     --stdout-count 4    \
     --stdout-file spam.stdout.log \
 -- spammy_program -a -b -c 100500