The log files in /var/log will grow over time, and potentially could fill the filesystem. It is advisable to employ a program such as logrotate to manage the automatic archiving of the logs. The logrotate program usually runs as a daily cron job, and can be configured to rotate, compress, remove, or mail the log files.

For example, a default configuration of logrotate might rotate the logs weekly, keeping 4 weeks worth of backlogs (by appending a sequence number to the filename), and compress the backlogs to save space. Additionally, the program can be configured to deliver a SIGHUP to syslogd so that the daemon will notice the now-empty log files and append to them appropriately.

For more information on logrotate, see the logrotate(8) man page, which contains a description of the program and the syntax of the configuration file.