hello all, this is my first real perl program you could say, and I was looking for suggestions/advice on it. I know there are other apache log rotaters out there but this one is mine :) It basically just takes the log renames it with a timestamp and gzips it the gracefully restarts apache. I was wondering if there was a better way to get a timestamp than to use a module, I mean I could manipulate localtime but that just seems like far too much annoyance. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#Script to roll log files over nightly and HUP httpd
use Date::Calc qw(Today);

#function declarations
sub graceful();

($year,$month,$day) = Today();
$logdir = "/var/log";
$logname = "httpd-access.log";
$timestamp = "$year$month$day";
$apachectl = "/usr/local/sbin/apachectl";
$gzip = "/usr/bin/gzip";

if (-e "$logdir/$logname" && !-e "$logdir/$logname.$timestamp")
{
        rename("$logdir/$logname", "$logdir/$logname.$timestamp");
        graceful();
} else {
        print "Cannot rotate log to pre-existing timestamp\n";
}
if (-e "$logdir/$logname.$timestamp" && !-e "$logdir/$logname.$timesta
+mp.gz")
{
        system("$gzip $logdir/$logname.$timestamp");
} else {
        print "file already exists";
}

sub graceful()
{
        system("$apachectl graceful"); #restart apache gracefully
}

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In reply to suggestions for log rotater... by orbadelic

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