Our awesome sysadmins have put the user agent into our AWStats so we are tracking these numbers now. They discovered something I overlooked. Netscape 4.x is 10 times more used than 7.x or 8.x. Wowsers! Some people really do not give up on the past.

Back in the Netscape is dead post, I used this to count the Netscape 7 hits.

grep Netscape/7 webserver.log* | wc -l

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! The above requires running for each version of Netscape. This is why I missed Netscape 4.

This is more convoluted, but I think it its a much better approach.

grep Netscape webserver.log* | awk -F\t ‘{print $11}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

It looks uglier, but its much more elegant. Maybe I ought to make a resolution for 2008 to be elegant in all my shell commands.

This version first pulls any entries with Netscape in the line. Next, the awk piece reports only the user agent string. The first sort puts all the similar entries next to each other so the uniq will not accidentally duplicate. The -c in the uniq counts. The final sort with the -n orders them by the uniq’s count. The largest will end up at the bottom.