Question

I’d like to write a script/batch that will bunch up my daily IIS logs and zip them up by month.

ex080801.log which is in the format of exyymmdd.log

ex080801.log – ex080831.log gets zipped up and the log files deleted.

The reason we do this is because on a heavy site a log file for one day could be 500mb to 1gb so we zip them up which compresses them by 98% and dump the real log file. We use webtrend to analyze the log files and it is capable of reading into a zip file.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to script this or would be willing to share some code?

Answer 1

You’ll need a command line tool to zip up the files. I recommend 7-Zip which is free and easy to use. The self-contained command line version (7za.exe) is the most portable choice.

Here’s a two-line batch file that would zip the log files and delete them afterwards:

7za.exe a -tzip ex%1-logs.zip %2\ex%1*.log del %2\ex%1*.log 

The first parameter is the 4 digit year-and-month, and the second parameter is the path to the directory containing your logs. For example: ziplogs.bat 0808 c:\logs

It’s possible to get more elaborate (i.e. searching the filenames to determine which months to archive). You might want to check out the Windows FINDSTR command for searching input text with regular expressions.