Invisible wrote:
> OK, so today I confirmed that you can in fact export data from the
> Windows event log into a plain CSV file. Which is great.
> 
> (Unfortunately, sometimes event descriptions contain line breaks, which
> is not so great.)
> 
> Anyway, I wrote a small Haskell program that deletes any multi-line
> events, and then another which grabs only the events I care about and
> does some trixy parsing of the event description to pull out the data I
> actually want. The result is a big CSV file containing a list of printer
> events - date, time, user, printer and page count.

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

> (There is *one* event in the log that says something like "document %4
> was printed on %6, byte count: %7, page count: %8". Which is really not
> especially helpful...)
> 
> So now I have a CSV file that contains the date, time, user, printer and
> page count. Just import that into Access and produce some stats, right?
> 
> Wrong! Access apparently can't parse any of the dates. Despite them all
> being perfectly valid dates (and it even *detects* that this column
> should be a date column), it fails to parse every single last one. >_<
> 
> So I used Haskell (which is really the wrong tool) to produce some
> statistics the hard way - by manually scanning the CSV file, reparsing
> the data and writing the results into yet *another* CSV file.

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

> And now, finally, I have a chart showing me how many pages each printer
> printed on a given day. Which is all I wanted in the first place!

That one I'd do in Excel.

> Mmm, apparently that printer in the corner hasn't printed a single
> damned page since July... Yep, it's definitely spare. :-)

-Aero

PS. http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

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