Okay, I doubt this post will be useful to anyone else, but I thought I might as well post it since I haven’t updated this blog in a while.
On ‘my’ web server I have some sites that are served by a shared Apache process. This stores daily logs, for one week, rotating the log numbering each day. I have a cron job that runs once a week and concatenates the past week’s logs into a single file, which is then stored elsewhere.
Today I was trying to run awstats to generate stats from the last months worth of logs (I check my sites stats once every month). However, I realised that my cron job was concatenating the daily logs into the weekly log file in the wrong order. This resulted in awstats only picking up the first day from each weekly log, as the rest of the log file had requests with earlier timestamps. It seems that awstats works through the log file chronologically.
So, to get my stats I had to re-order the log files so that the entries were listed chronologically as they should be. To do this I decided to use PHP, mostly just because that is the language I am most familiar with.