[exim] exim 4.63 SMTP listener keeping log file open for day…

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Author: Marc Haber
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [exim] exim 4.63 SMTP listener keeping log file open for days
Hi,

one Debian exim user reports (see http://bugs.debian.org/476958) that
his exim SMTP listener process (the one running with -bd -q30m) keeps
/var/log/exim/mainlog open for days after log rotation:

|# ps auxww | grep [4]349
|102       4349  0.0  0.2  11756  2884 ?        Ss   Apr26   0:01 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m
|# lsof -p 4349
|COMMAND  PID        USER   FD   TYPE   DEVICE    SIZE   NODE NAME
|[snippage]
|exim4   4349 Debian-exim    6w   REG      3,5  184728    128 /var/log/exim4/mainlog.1 (deleted)


Since Debian rotates mainlog daily, this means that the file wasn't
closed for at least more than 24 hours, after /var/log/exim4/mainlog
was rotated to /var/log/exim4/mainlog.1 and, the day later, was
compressed to /var/log/exim4/mainlog.2.gz and deleted.

I have never seen this happen on any of my own systems, and Debian has
been shipping this setup of exim 4.63 as part of our default install
in the stable distribution for more than a year.

I therefore strongly suspect that this is a local issue on the system
of the bug reporter, but since exim is documented to close the log
immediately after writing to it, which situation could lead to the log
kept open for this excessive amount of time?

Greetings
Marc

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