Time for action – translating the referer logs to a human-readable format

We can translate a referer log to a human-readable format by using the command line utility awk. We can convert the entire referer.log file to a human-readable format by using the following command sequence:

$ cat referer.log | awk '{printf("%s ", strftime("%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S",$1)); print $2 " " $3 " " $4;}' > referer_human_readable.log

The log messages from referer.log, as shown, should look like the following messages after conversion:

12/Sep/2010:01:36:06 127.0.0.1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://en.wikiquote.org/

12/Sep/2010:01:36:12 127.0.0.1 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Main_Page http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiquote/en/b/bc/Wiki.png

The command we saw before works fine for the conversion of the entire log file, but is not useful if we want to see the live referer log with human-readable timestamps. For achieving this, we can use the following command:

$ tail -f referer.log | awk '{printf("%s...