Dealing with logfiles under Unix is an issue I've been thinking about a
lot, and I have a solution in mind that I haven't written up yet that
should answer Penny's original question.
 
This isn't a unix list, and many of the folks on here are VMers, so you can
close your eyes while I babble a brief description of on way to solve the
"logfile problem":
 
create a named pipe called /whatever/logfile.  Whenever listserv writes to
its logfile, it'll really be writing into this named pipe.
 
Have a proccess reading from that pipe proccessing the logfile.
"Proccessing" can mean abstracting, compressing, monitoring, whatever.  It
could simply be re-saving the file to some other directory.
 
Use cron to periodically send a SIGHUP or SIGUSR to that proccess, which
tells it to "do something", either mail off an abstract or report, or close
its current copy of the logfile and open a new one.
 
Since listserv is all the while writing to the named pipe, and Unix
guarantees that the information in that pipe is buffered, you'll never lose
any information while the proccess is doing its periodic "something"s.
 
You can open your eyes again. :-)
 
I intend to write this up more formally and even write a perl program to
archive logfiles by date.  I have no idea when I'll actually write it,
though.
 
Please feel free to send me any responses, but don't post to the entire
list -- not that many people are interested (I don't think...)
 
Lee Silverman     [log in to unmask]      http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/
         Live each day as if your life had just begun.  --  Goethe