PHP-Scripts Blog » Linux

Tail -f apache access_log

TDavid — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:19:17 +0000

Here is how to use SSH/Telnet do a search and locate your access_log file. The linux locate command will help:

locate access_log

You might see lots of logs separated by domain names. A common location for these logs are /var/log/apache, so cd your way there:

cd /var/log/apache
/var/log/apache$ tail -f access_log

Now a stream using tail of the file will occur in real time and you can watch and see who is accessing what in near real time.

Reference: Parsing Apache acces log files using PHP

Using floor and time to calculate number of days elapsed from UNIX timestamp

TDavid — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 20:06:51 +0000

Finding out the number of days elapsed from a UNIX timestamp is actually pretty straightforward. If you only know two dates then first you’ll need to convert the date to a UNIX timestamps and then subtract the most recent timestamp from the older timestamp like this:

$old_timestamp = 1102971600;
$elapsed_seconds = time() - $old_timestamp;
print ‘Seconds elapsed since ‘ . date(“m-d-Y H:i:s”,$old_timestamp) . “: $elapsed_seconds”;
?>

Now, let’s convert those seconds to days using the floor() function, by just adding the following code to the code above:

/*
divide #seconds by 60 for minutes
divide #of minutes by 60 for hours
divide #of hours by 24 for days
use floor to get integer for day
*/
$elapsed_days = floor(($elapsed_seconds / 60) / 60 / 24);
print “
Number of days elapsed: $elapsed_days”;

How to change the server date and time

TDavid — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:50:51 +0000

This is more a Linux task than a PHP one, but for those needing to change their server date/time, it can be done with the linux DATE command as follows:

date - s `+ 1500`

This might require root or sudo privileges. In that case the command would be:

sudo date - s `+ 1500`

On a PHP note, I broke down ways to work with the PHP date() function in my php-scripts diary on 12/17/1999. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it was nearly six years ago!