A Good Old-Fashioned Perl Log Analyzer

A Good Old-Fashioned Perl Log Analyzer

A recent Lobsters post lauding the virtues of AWK reminded me that although the language is powerful and lightning-fast, I usually find myself exceeding its capabilities and reaching for Perl instead. One such application is analyzing voluminous log files such as the ones generated by this blog. Yes, WordPress has stats, but I've never let reinvention of the wheel get in the way of a good programming exercise.

So I whipped this script up on Sunday night while watching RuPaul's Drag Race reruns. It parses my Apache web server log files and reports on hits from week to week.