Spotted an interesting problem where adding the ‘compress’ directive to logrotate stopped it from doing its daily restart of Apache.
After a bit of diagnosis it turns out that the gzip compression used by logrotate can be very sensitive to non-letter characters in filenames. My log files were all named with an underscore instead of the dot character e.g. access_log instead of access.log.
I think I did this initially to make it easier to find them e.g. locate *_log would give me all the httpd log files I was interested in, instead of locate *.log giving every log file on the system.
I’ve renamed them all back to the more conventional access.log and it is all working as it should.
Lesson learned, don’t try to be too clever in IT.