This article's primary example is a single static text file with 5M lines. Sure, in that case, awk works great, but how often does that come up? In the real world, those 5M lines are growing by several hundred thousand every day, and after a few months, grows beyond what a single computer or awk can handle. Further, users want real-time results, not just a few times a day when your cron script runs. Unix commands are…
Why would you need to look at the entire history of the log file each time? Isn't it logical to have historical summary info and then the full log for say the past month?
> Isn't it logical to have historical summary info and then the full log for say the past month?
What if you want to change what's contained in your summary?