Automate Your Server Maintenance: A Simple Bash Script for Log Cleanup

Tired of logs eating up your disk space? Learn how to build a simple, automated log cleanup script using Bash. Every developer or sysadmin has been there: you log into a server to investigate an issue, only to find that the disk is 100% full. More often than not, the culprit is a mountain of old log files that haven't been touched in months. While tools like logrotate are the industry standard, sometimes you need a lightweight, custom solution that you can understand and deploy in seconds. In this post, I'll walk you through a simple Bash script I built to automate log cleanup and keep your storage breathing easy. The Problem Applications generate logs—lots of them. Whether it's access logs, error logs, or debug traces, these files grow silently. Without a retention policy, they will eventually consume all available disk space, potentially crashing your applications. The Solution: auto_clean_log.sh I created a script that identifies .log files older than a specific number of days, dele