Support file source close when file not active for a long time

[suikammd]

A note for the community

• Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
• If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment

Use Cases

No response

Attempted Solutions

No response

Proposal

Hi Vector team,

Currently, the file source keeps file handles open indefinitely, even for files that haven't received new writes for a long time. This can lead to issues in environments like Kubernetes or systems relying on log rotation, where open file descriptors can block volume unmounting or prevent rotated log files from being deleted.

It would be very helpful if Vector could support a general-purpose mechanism to:

Close file handles automatically after a period of inactivity (no new writes),

Reopen the file when new data is detected.

This behavior would help reduce FD usage and avoid interfering with file lifecycle management, without the downsides of ignore_older (which can cause data loss by skipping files entirely).

Is there any plan to support this? If so, I'd love to help implement this feature.
Thanks for the great work!

References

No response

Version

No response