I've done a bit of site: searching with Google on Server Fault, Super User and Stack Overflow. I also checked non site specific results and and didn't really see a question like this, so here goes...

I did spot this question, related to grep and awk which has some great knowledge but I don't feel the text qualification challenge was addressed. This question also broadens the scope to any platform and any program.

I've got squid or apache logs based on the NCSA combined format. When I say based, meaning the first n col's in the file are per NCSA combined standards, there might be more col's with custom stuff.

Here is an example line from a squid combined log:

1.1.1.1 - - [11/Dec/2010:03:41:46 -0500] "GET http://yourdomain.com:8080/en/some-page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 2142 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; C) AppleWebKit/532.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)" TCP_MEM_HIT:NONE

I'd like to be able to parse n logs and output specific columns, for sorting, counting, finding unique values etc

The main challenge and what makes it a little tricky and also why I feel this question hasn't yet been asked or answered, is the text qualification conundrum.

When I spotted asql from the grep/awk question, I was very excited but then realised that it didn't support combined out of the box, something I'll look at extending I guess.

Looking forward to answers, and learning new stuff! Answers doesn't have to be limited to platform or program/language. For the context of this question, the platforms I use the most are Linux or OSX.

Cheers