Redirecting Logs to an External Program

TransferLog "|bin/rotatelogs /var/logs/apachelog 86400"

You can also use CustomLog or transferLog to redirect ("pipe") the log output to an external program instead of a file. To do this, you need to begin with the pipe character "|", followed by the path to a program that will receive the log information on its standard input. This example uses the rotatelogs program included with Apache, which is described in a later section.

When an external program is used, it will be run as the user who started httpd. This will be root if the server was started by root; be absolutely sure that the program is secure. Also, when entering a file path on non-Unix platforms, care should be taken to make sure that only forward slashes are used, even though the platform may allow the use of backslashes. In general, it is a good idea to always use forward slashes throughout the configuration files.