I started looking around the web for yet another log reader. Nothing fancy, just Apache logs. All of them can read Apache style logs. I had as much time as I needed, all 5 minutes of it, so there was no hurry. I found Visitors web-logs analyzer pretty quickly.

It fit the bill.

• No install necessary and I like that.
• small footprint
• free
• fast

I downloaded then extracted the files. Quick cd into the directory, run

$ visitors --help

so I know what some options are, and I'm good. It's so easy that I can do it. Utilities rock.

Here is what I do to get some quick running stats on the visitors to debiantutorials.org at any time. It's so easy...

First I download my logs using wget, like so:

wget -P /your/save/to/directory ftp://uname: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it /../../logs/server-logs.log

Looking at the command we can surmise the following:

Now that I have my log file I cd into the directory that I downloaded it to. Then, and I learned this from running visitors with the --h option, I parsed my log file

$ visitors -A server-logs.log > visitors.html

Takes one (1) second to parse my 10 some-odd MB file from today. That's cool. Like I said -- it doesn't give me all that much. It gives me exactly what I want to see. So, I double-click on the visitors.html file that was just made and Opera fires-up with a page showing me my stats from the day up to just a minute ago.

You may not think it right away but this whole process takes 2 seconds longer than the amount of time necessary to wget my log file. It was 10MB and on a fast connection, that only takes a couple of minutes.

--machiner 9 Jan 07

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