Truncating a file while it's being used (Linux

Question

I have a process that's writing a lot of data to stdout, which I'm redirecting to a log file. I'd like to limit the size of the file by occasionally copying the current file to a new name and truncating it.

My usual techniques of truncating a file, like

cp /dev/null file

don't work, presumably because the process is using it.

Is there some way I can truncate the file? Or delete it and somehow associate the process' stdout with a new file?

FWIW, it's a third party product that I can't modify to change its logging model.

EDIT redirecting over the file seems to have the same issue as the copy above - the file returns to its previous size next time it's written to:

ls -l sample.log ; echo > sample.log ; ls -l sample.log ; sleep 10 ; ls -l sample.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 1291999 Jun 11  2009 sample.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 1 Jun 11  2009 sample.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 1292311 Jun 11  2009 sample.log

Answer 1

@Hobo use freopen(), it reuses stream to either open the file specified by filename or to change its access mode. If a new filename is specified, the function first attempts to close any file already associated with stream (third parameter) and disassociates it. Then, independently of whether that stream was successfully closed or not, freopen opens the file specified by filename and associates it with the stream just as fopen would do using the specified mode.

if a thirdparty binary is generating logs we need to write a wrapper which will rotate the logs, and thirdparty will run in proxyrun thread as below.

#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>

using namespace std;

extern "C" void * proxyrun(void * pArg){
   static int lsiLineNum = 0;
   while(1) 
   {
     printf("\nLOGGER: %d",++lsiLineNum);
     fflush(stdout);
   }
  return NULL;
}


int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  pthread_t lThdId;
  if(0 != pthread_create(&lThdId, NULL, proxyrun, NULL))
  {
    return 1;
  }

  char lpcFileName[256] = {0,};

  static int x = 0;

  while(1)
  {
    printf("\n<<<MAIN SLEEP>>>");
    fflush(stdout);
    sprintf(lpcFileName, "/home/yogesh/C++TestPrograms/std.txt%d",++x);
    freopen(lpcFileName,"w",stdout);
    sleep(10);
  }

  return 0;
}