PERLing Your Way Out of Chaos

Managing and analyzing logs can sometimes be a nightmare, specially if the process has been running for hours. Things get more interesting when a bug is discovered and no one has a clue as to where things went wrong. Since the beginning of time man has been using Perl to crawl his way out of the logging wilderness. This, and the reason that the new process I'm writing for out stock trading app is going to produce logs amounting to the size of a Tolkein fantasy, prompted me to try my hand at clearing things up using the trusty old scripting language.

My prior experience using Perl is limited to writing a few scripts for the Internet Programming module during my under grad days. So I had to start from scratch. With a lot of help from various tutorials and articles on the web, I finally put together a script which was pretty handy.


Original Log

Some useful links:
PERL string searching with user input
Multi-line string (pattern) matching
Trouble shooting file handling related issues
Guide to metacharacters used in perl regular expressions









After Initial Extraction

After Final Extraction