• Data and Technology

    Posted on July 10th, 2006

    Written by cliff

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    In this little script, we take the Apache access_log file, and read it into an array. Each element of the array is split on the space (" "), and we print out the first element, which is the IP address of the machine connecting to our website.

    Here is the format for the log file:


    69.47.145.197 - - [15/Jan/2006:22:35:12 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 354
    69.47.145.197 - - [15/Jan/2006:22:35:39 -0500] "GET /content/images/oa1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 301 376
    69.47.145.197 - - [15/Jan/2006:22:35:40 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 354
    202.7.166.167 - - [16/Jan/2006:00:02:41 -0500] "GET /content/images/oa1.jpg HTTP/1.0" 301 376
    202.7.166.167 - - [16/Jan/2006:00:06:23 -0500] "GET /content/images/oa1.jpg HTTP/1.0" 301 376
    66.249.64.14 - - [16/Jan/2006:00:14:08 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 301 364

    PLAIN TEXT
    PERL:
    1. #!/usr/bin/perl
    2. open (FD, "/path/to/your/access_log");
    3. while (<fd>)
    4. {
    5. @array = split (/[" "]/);
    6. foreach $i (@array)
    7.         {
    8.         print $array[0] . "\n";
    9.         }
    10. }
    11. close (FD);

    In this example we use the special variable "$_". This is used to hold data from the file without having to do an explicit read operation. If we wanted to split the lines on other characters we could do something like this:

    @array = split (/[-,:," "]/);

    This would split it on the dash "-", colon ":" and the space " ".

    If we wanted to read out each line as it is read in, we could simply replace:

    print $array[0] . "\n";

    With:

    print $i . "\n";

    This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Data and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • 5 Comments

    Take a look at some of the responses we've had to this article.

    1. benizi
      Dec 9th
      Reply

      It looks like you’re coming from a PHP background (based on seeing how others who do that do things in Perl). It’s pretty odd to use the ‘.’ (concatenation) operator when you just want to interpolate a variable.

      print $array[0] . "\n";

      is usually written:

      print "$array[0]\n";

      And you’re doing something odd in the foreach loop. (You’ll start to abbreviate that to ‘for’ if you continue with Perl — the two are synonymous even though there are two forms of “what to loop over”.) Why are you doing:

      for $i (@array) { print $array[0] . "\n"; }

      That’ll give you as many copies of $array[0] as there are parts in the array.

      You can accomplish everything you’re doing in this file with:

      perl -lanwe 'print $F[0]' /path/to/your/access_log

      For text processing things, it’s often better to use (with no explicit file-opening/-closing) than .

      Just some tips for someone who might come across this later, as I did.

    2. benizi
      Dec 9th
      Reply

      (In the previous comment, the code tags ate my file operator:)

      <> is better than <FD>

    3. benizi
      Dec 9th
      Reply

      Oh, and really, text-processing that’s this straight-forward is usually better done with ‘cut’:

      cut -f1 -d' ' /path/to/access_log

      (But, if you want to do something more complicated, it’s nice to have the scaffolding that you have:)


      #!/usr/bin/perl
      while (<>) {
      my @array = split;
      # do something with @array here
      print "$array[0]\n";
      }

    4. Stefhen
      Dec 12th
      Reply

      awk ‘{print $1}’ /path/to/your/access_log will do the same thing.

    5. cliff
      Dec 13th
      Reply

      @Benzi & Stefhen,

      Thanks for the tips… These little snips are notes to myself from my adventures trying to teach myself perl, so having your pointers really helps. I tend to like using the UNIX tools like cut, sed and awk better as well because I’m much more familiar with them.

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