How to correct delete catalina.out?

Question

I couldn't restart Tomcat webserver. But catalina.out get very big. I have tried delete on test server and created new empty. But Tomcat doesn't write anymore in new catalina.out. How correct delete/create empty new one ?

Answer 1

If you are using Gnu/Linux or Mac OS X, you can just do:

echo "" > catalina.out

or even shorter:

> catalina.out 

Answer 2

for me

echo "" > catalina.out

or

sudo echo "" > catalina.out

didn't work, as the file was created with root/other user privilege

sudo truncate -s 0 catalina.out

worked for me. here -s is for size and I am setting the file size to 0

Answer 3

In base Tomcat installs, catalina.out is usually the result of stdout/stderr redirections via the Tomcat launcher script.

If you run Tomcat on a Unix system, and if you delete the file while Tomcat is running, the problem is that the process will still have a descriptor open to that file and continue to write on it. The solution is therefore to use a program dedicated to handling such cases. For instance, logrotate (which is standard in pretty much all Linux distributions).

Answer 4

When tomcat server is used, it is pretty normal that the disk usage increases as logs accumulate in the catalina.out file.

If the catalina.out is deleted after tomcat is stopped, it will create a new catalina.out once tomcat starts and writes to it. But in your case, since catalina.out was deleted while tomcat was running it is holding up the file reference and writing to the deleted file. You can get rid of this by restarting the tomcat server.

Actually you can clear the log of catalina.out file without stopping tomcat with the command below.

sudo cat /dev/null > /opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-9.0.37/logs/catalina.out  

To keep catalina.out smaller and backup older logs, either one of the following ways can be used:

1. You could use the above Linux command and add it to a CronScheduler to run daily/ weekly/ monthly or yearly as preferred.

2. Use logrotate tool in Linux. It is a log managing command-line tool in Linux. This can rotate the log files under different conditions. Particularly, we can rotate log files on a fixed duration or if the file has grown to a certain size. You can click here for more info on this.