Comment 11 for bug 1284164

Some info here,
  It seems that I had a bad 'status' file in ~/.cache/logrotate/status somehow.
~/.cache/upstart/logrotate.conf said:
error: bad top line in state file /home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status

$ ls -l /home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status
-rw-r--r-- 1 smoser smoser 385 May 31 2013 /home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status

after removing that file, then logrotate functions again.

Not sure what could have caused it, but there was binary data in that file when I looked, and 'file' determined it to be 'data' (ie, it was not gzipped, or xml or anything that made sense to me).

After removal and then:
 start logrotate

$ file /home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status
/home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status: ASCII text
$ tail -n 5 /home/smoser/.cache/logrotate/status
"/home/smoser/.cache/upstart/unity.log" 2014-3-5-11:16:52
"/home/smoser/.cache/upstart/gnome-settings-daemon.log" 2014-3-5-11:16:52
"/home/smoser/.cache/upstart/window-stack-bridge.log" 2014-3-5-11:16:52
"/home/smoser/.cache/upstart/update-notifier-release.log" 2014-3-5-11:16:52
"/home/smoser/.cache/upstart/update-notifier-crash-_var_crash__bin_bash.1000.crash.log" 2014-3-5-11:16:52

So it would seem something screwed up that file and I was forever stuck.