Decreasing the number of generations kept by logrotate won’t delete old log files

When you decrease the number of generations that logrotate will keep by setting rotate parameter, to reduce the disk space used by logs, for example, you’ll have to delete old log files by yourself.

For example, assume you have a configuration file containing

rotate 10

there will be log files from foo.log, foo.log.1 … foo.log.10. When you decrease the number to 5 like

rotate 5

logrotate will remove foo.log.6, but won’t remove foo.log.7 … foo.log.10. Make sure to remove these files manually.