Duplicate Apache Logs?? WHY??

[Sir William]

I'm running the latest Release on CentOS 5 64-bit. I just realized that all the apache logs are duplicated in /usr/local/apache/domlogs/ and /usr/local/apache/domlogs/username/ Why is this? It's a waste of space, resources, etc. as every apache access required double the amount of time to log that it really has to. I realize the username folders are aliased from each users home folder, so why have all the files in the domlogs folder? Can somebody explain this?

[sparek-3]

They aren't really duplicates, they are just hard-links.

If you stat each file or do an ls -ali of each file you will see that they share the inode. The inode refers to what is actually taking up disk space and since they are both linked to the same inode, the disk space is only being used once. There is no double disk space being used.

As for why this setup is in place, it is likely to allow the logs user to FTP into the server and see all of the apache logs associated with their account. I'm not really sure what all of the reasons may be.