Hi all!

am considering the possibility to use logfiles in order to create implicite user profiles.Could a perl script be helpful?

Thanks very much in advance!

Whether a perl script could be helpful or not, depends on what you want to do. Please point out more detailled, what you are planning to do.\n\n

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Hi renee,
thanks a lot for answering.As to my purpose, it is extacting any information from the generated logfiles so that to specify some user preferences (useful for a recommender as a next step)...I m not a perl programmer and I m just considering the possibility of taking profit of these Log files.
Could I then win any information concerning users? If yes what informations?

So, if I understand your purposes, you want to parse existing logfiles to extract information about users. In that case Perl is a good choice to solve your problems.

Quote

Could I then win any information concerning users? If yes what informations?

You have to answer these questions yourself. We don't know anything about the logfiles (what is logged? are there information about users?).\n\n

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Hi renee,

in fact I am just envisaging the whole idea and I still don t have concreate informations.The logfiles, however, should contain informations about the user, since they are generated, when a logged in user chooses some services (let s suppose that by each choice, a logfile is generated).
And as the available Logfile analysis Tools, give informations about the whole traffic and netflow etc, they are useless in my case, since I am interested in individually extracted informations.Could a perlscript still solve this?

Thanks a lot!

If the information are in the logfile, you can extract them with a perl script. But without more detailled information it is impossible to help you.

Hi renee,

it s a kind of digital service system where services are offered to different users (for example booking a hotel room with some features which are to be chosen) and am wondering, whether it would be meaningful, to use a perlscript for a huge number of logfiles...(is there a way to do it automatically for each generated logfile?)

Am sincerely thankful.

You can get all generated logfiles via opendir, readdir, closedir (see perldoc -f opendir, perldoc -f readdir, perldoc -f closedir). So you can start your perl scirpt once, get all logfiles and parse them automatically.

thanks a lot... but what about the output? could I get it as a data base? That means to each "username" its corresponding information? (for instance the URL sent by the webserver) if no, how does the output look like?

You can do what you want - store the information in a database, print them on the screen or print the information into a file.

If you want to store the information into a database, you should read the documentation of DBI. A lot of database management systems are supported by Perl.