Nice to hear from you. Circular files or circular logs are less of an OS specific thing are are more an application specific thing.

For instance, MS SQL Server has their transaction log, which can be a circular log, that only holds a specific size and can then delete old transactions past a certain size.

If I recall correctly, exchange server does it a bit differently. It uses a round-robin approach where the log is actually two files. The first file, when it reaches its size limit, moves. The new file then begins to grow until it reaches the size limit. Then new file replace the first file and a new file is creates. This process repeats indefinitely keeping the log from growing beyond the collective size limit. When the log is viewed or exported, a concatenation of the two is what the user sees, looking like one log.

This is a great question. And this reply is getting really long. I think I will have to create a couple of new articles to explore how to create and include circular files and logs in applications.

If you have any examples or ideas, please let me know.

Thanks
Roy