>> Personally, I'd import the whole log into a relational database, and 
>> process it that way. (Or maybe even use a webserver that keeps its logs 
>> in a database in the first place, rather than a huge flat file.) But 
>> apparently that's just me...
> 
>   Talk about an overly complicated solution for a simple problem.

Once the data is in a real database, you can sort it and search it and 
compute stats on it and basically do whatever you want with it, 
effortlessly and easily. But sure, if you *only* wanted to quickly see 
if a particular IP address appears or something, you could use a text 
search. But if I was hunting through web logs, I'd probably want to 
build all sorts of statistics or do multi-way searches - the exact task 
that databases are especially designed to perform. Why not use the right 
tool?

>> On the contrary, figuring out how to work grep vs writing a program in a 
>> language I already know well is likely to take *slightly* more than 
>> merely a hundred times longer. (Although you could argue that's a 
>> one-time cost.)
> 
>   Writing something like "grep 'hello.*there' file.txt" doesn't require a
> lot of time or thinking.

Nor does opening file.txt in a text editor and running a quick search. 
(Not that I can think of a reason to want to do this in the first place...)

>> Personally I just dislike scripting languages.
> 
>   What's the difference between "a scripting language" and "a real language"?

Now that is surprisingly hard to pin down. ;-)

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