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Best way to count file downloads on a website

It's surprising how difficult it is to find a simple, concise answer to this question:

  1. I have a file, foo.zip, on my website
  2. What can I do to find out how many people have accessed this file?
  3. I could use Tomcat calls if necessary
Solution

  • Or you could parse the log file if you don't need the data in realtime.

    grep foo.zip /path/to/access.log | grep 200 | wc -l

    In reply to comment:

    The log file also contains bytes downloaded, but as someone else pointed out, this may not reflect the correct count if a user cancels the download on the client side.