On Thu, 13 Apr 1995, Joel Crisp wrote:
> > I've been thinking about this too. Let's call the string a "log
> > template". Why not base it on the strftime() function? The current
> > CLF would be:
> >
> > %R %i %u [%d/%m/%Y:%H:%M:%S %O] "%q" %s %n
> If you do this, PLEASE make the field separator consistent - particularly
> as the date/time in the above string is so hard to parse with tools like
> 'awk'
Er, it's entirely up to you, the server administrator, to decide how to
separate strings (with this system). You should be cognizant of what
characters may show up in which strings, however - for example, spaces are
allowed in the request, the user_agent, even the authentication name.
..meaning that a system administrator could easily decide on a log
format which was *impossible* to parse. I'm not sure allowing this is
doing them any favors. Including the quotes in the expansion of %q,
and replacing the string of date-piece directives above with something
that expanded to a single, consistent, well-delimited date format
would guarantee that it is at least *possible* to parse the resulting
log file. (It would also make it a whole lot easier on people who
wanted to write adapative log-file analysers without necessarily
including all the smarts necessary to handle arbitrarily complicated
delimiting constructs...).
rst