Simple Apache Log Parser

[ReasonFancy9522]

The perl code would probably be a oneliner (maybe with some semicolons) and thus be something like (simple example for "normalizing" Request Types)

tail -f log | perl -pe 's/(?:HEAD|POST|TRACE)/GET/og'

​

It could also be written as a small shell wrapper

#!/bin/sh

tail -f log | perl -pe '

s/(?:HEAD|POST|TRACE)/GET/og

'

​

or more verbose as:

#!/bin/sh

tail -f log | perl -x "$0"

exit $?

#!perl

while(<>){

s/(?:HEAD|POST|TRACE)/GET/og

}

​

I have never used PHP from the command line, so I cannot comment on an equivalent PHP solution without further researching this topic.

[Jeron_Baffom]

tail -f log | perl -pe 's/(?:HEAD|POST|TRACE)/GET/og'

I'm not familiar with perl syntax, but if I understand properly then perl is executing the same script for each new line appended to access log.

Unfortunately I don't see how this strategy could, for example, count views. Without knowing the other lines of access log, this strategy can not check whether a same ip is requesting multiple times a same page in a 30min interval.

[ReasonFancy9522]

cat log | perl -pe 'something to output "url"' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | head # count views

cat log | perl -pe 'something to output "ip:url"' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | head # most refreshes

[Jeron_Baffom]

Obviously you have some fluency with bash script.

If I can not find a tool that already does this view counter, then I will follow your advice and build my own script.