The very, very poor man’s Google Analytics: tail, cut, sort, uniq & wc

1 minute, 6 seconds

I still have what most would call an unfounded fear of privacy when it comes to Google. They may receive a copy of every email I send to my friends who use gmail, they may place every call to me via Google Voice, they may server every ad from Double Click (which I then block) and I sure as heck never stray from their bad-ass search on google.com, but I don’t host anything with them directly.

I’ve run my share of web analizer tools, but some times I wanna know, right now, “how many people subscribe to my blog feed?”. Now, I probably should be using FeedBurner (No shit – I did not know, ’til just this second, that they too are now owned by Google. Oh, the irony!), but my site, despite its claims, is still a bit of the cobbler’s child when it comes to analytics. Heck, I still don’t have mod_usertrack on!

Enter tail, cut, sort, uniq and wc!

tail -10000 access_log|grep /blog|cut -d" " -f 1|sort|uniq|wc

In layman’s term’s that’s “get the last 10000 lines of my access log, cut each line into fields separated by the space character, grab the first field (the IP address in this case), sort the resulting lines of now just an IP address per line, remove the duplicates and count the number resuling lines (or IP addresses)”. Presto! 388 of you out there, including all the bots, spiders, crawlers, trolls and goblins. Thanks for the interest!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *