The TimedRotatingFileHandler of python logging system

The name of TimedRotatingFileHandler is like the best for my need: rotate every day, keep 30 days of copy. I know the logrotate of Linux system provides the same service, but I prefer to make the program easy to install and run without System Admin (root) involving in the process. Another reason I am not using logrotate is that when my program is writing into log at midnight, logrotate would perform "mv myprogram.log myprogram.log.20151015", and my program is still writing into that file which has a new name now: myprogram.log.20151015, while I still have another program trying to access myprogram.log for display purpose, then that program will fail.


So I want to have a native logging handler to do log rotating, and change to a new file of "myprogram.log" at midnight. The TimedRotatingFileHandler looks perfect to me.


But it is not.


The TimedRotatingFileHandler only rotate the log when the program has been running for more than 24 hours (Assuming the interval setting is 1 Day ), or if the log file has not been modified (before loading) for more than 24 hours. You can check the code, but that is what it is. If your program runs every day from 1AM to 11PM, then the log is never rotate, it keep appending forever. It is using the last modified time of the log file , or current time when the file doesn't exist, to decide when to rotate.


One limitation is that in Linux there is not "file creation time" or "birth time". Most file system don't support this file attribute. I guess ext4 does, under some configuration, but we can't rely on it.