Most sites solve this problem by periodically
compressing and setting aside old log files.
This will present no problem for wusage, as long
as wusage has already analyzed the data in the
log file that has been set aside. Programs such
as Unix compress
, and DOS-oriented
.zip
utilities such as PKWare's
PKZIP, are useful tools to compress and store
old log files. It is suggested that administrators
compress and set aside old log files immediately
after running wusage, just after midnight each
day or on Sunday for weekly analysis.
Wusage will politely ignore data that has already
been analyzed if it is present in a log file, but
setting such data aside in another file does
speed up the program.
"My server generates a new log file for each day, so I have dozens of log files already and more on the way. How can I analyze these logs with wusage?"
If you have many uncompressed log files, just use
the logdir
option
to tell wusage where to find them all, and keep
them all in a single directory until they have been
analyzed. This feature is new as of version 4.1.
You can keep them there indefinitely if you
wish, but wusage runs faster if only the data not
yet analyzed is present in the log directory.
If your log files are compressed and you do not
wish to uncompress them,
skip ahead to read about coping with compressed
log files.
"I have many mirror sites, so I have a collection of log files that all contain entries from the same period in time. Can wusage cope with this?"
As of version 4.1, the answer is yes.
Just use the logdir
option to tell wusage where to find the log files you have
collected. If you have more than 20 log files that
cover the same period in time, for instance
50 log files from 50 mirrors of the same site, wusage
may slow down considerably. This does not
occur with non-overlapping log files, even if there
are hundreds of them. If your needs cannot be met with
a limit of 20 overlapping log files, please
contact us with information about your specific needs.
(If the above link does not work for you, send
email to wusage@boutell.com
instead.)
The Unix cat
and zcat
commands are extremely useful to reconstruct
a single log file. Even better, thanks to the
-l
option of wusage, you can avoid
creating an actual combined disk file of your
log entirely. Consider the following Unix
command line:
cat oldlog1 oldlog2 oldlog3 | wusage -l -
The special filename -
(a single dash)
signals wusage to read its log entries from
standard input, which is piped in from the
Unix cat
program. For more information
about cat
, try the Unix command
man cat
.
Important note: it is important to feed log files to cat in ascending order. An older log file should precede a newer one.
"What if I have compressed data?"
The following Unix pipeline will send several compressed log files to wusage:
zcat oldlog1.Z oldlog2.Z | wusage -l -
And the following pipeline will send a combination of compressed and uncompressed log files to wusage:
zcat oldlog1.Z oldlog2.Z | cat - oldlog3 oldlog4 | wusage -l
-
Note that both cat and wusage are being fed information
from the output of the preceding program, using the
special filename -
.
"What about non-Unix platforms?"
The MSDOS-related operating systems support the
the type
command, which can be used
to output several files and pipe that output to wusage:
type oldlog1.dat oldlog2.dat oldlog3.dat | wusage -l -
"I ran wusage on an old log file, and now I have zero accesses for the last two months! What happened?"
Wusage normally creates reports through the most recent complete day or week, and will not generate those reports again. You can override this behavior using the -b and -e command line options, which are used to force wusage to start re-generating reports at an earlier date, or to stop well before the present date. If you inadvertently produce empty reports for the most recent several weeks or months, just use the -b option to specify a date from which wusage should start re-generating those reports, and specify the more recent logfile as well using the -l option.
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Copyright 1996, Boutell.Com,
Inc.
wusage@boutell.com
Boutell.Com, Inc - PO Box 20837, Seattle WA, 98102, USA
Phone/Fax
+1 206.325.3009