This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_008B_01C1092B.038FE450 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable problem resolved, by adding another ' - ' to the su statement so as to = accept the environment variables for the user created to run rotatelogs, = it nolonger tries to kill roots shell. so now the directive is: CustomLog "| su - -c '/usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/httpd/apache2mysql/apache2mysql_log_bunny 3600' logsync" mysql and error_log returns=20 [Tue Jul 10 10:25:34 2001] [notice] Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) = (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4. 0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01 configured -- resuming normal operations once again thanks for giving me places to search. ------=_NextPart_000_008B_01C1092B.038FE450 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable