Tomcat: rotar archivo catalina.out

If catalina.out becomes 2GB in size, tomcat crashes and fails to start without any error message. To avoid this scenario you should rotate catalina.out frequently. This article describes how to setup auto rotation of catalina.out on a linux/unix machine.

How to automatically rotate catalina.out daily or when it becomes bigger than 5M

1. Create this file

/etc/logrotate.d/tomcat 

2. Copy the following contents into the above file

/var/log/tomcat/catalina.out {  
 copytruncate  
 daily  
 rotate 7  
 compress  
 missingok  
 size 5M  
}  

About the above configuration:

Make sure that the path /var/log/tomcat/catalina.out above is adjusted to point to your tomcat’s catalina.out
daily - rotates the catalina.out daily
rotate – keeps at most 7 log files
compress – compresses the rotated files
size – rotates if the size of catalina.out is bigger than 5M
You don’t need to do anything else.

How it works
Every night the cron daemon runs jobs listed in the /etc/cron.daily/ directory
This triggers the /etc/cron.daily/logrotate file which is generally shipped with linux installations. It runs the command “/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf“
The /etc/logrotate.conf includes all scripts in the /etc/logrotate.d/ directory.
This triggers the /etc/logrotate.d/tomcat file that you wrote in the previous step.

Run logrotate manually
Run the following command to run the cron job manually

/usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf  

Fuente: http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-rotate-tomcat-catalinaout