novice query

Charles Powne (cpowne@teleport.com)
Sat, 14 Dec 1996 23:17:05 -0800 (PST) 

hey now,

i've recently downloaded wwwstat 2.0 and,
although i'm quite the novice with Perl
(and programming in general), i have managed
to figure out how to configure and use it.
in fact, i have been able to get it to
successfully create a report... for the
current day.

the problem is - and this is probably
really obvious for the savvy folks reading
this tale of woe - my ISP feels it is
neccessary to gzip the access_log file
at the end of each day.

pwd
/home/www/vs/httpd.soleilmoon/logs/OLD

ls -lg access_log*
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www         46240 Dec 14 00:56 access_log.0
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          6321 Dec 14 01:31 access_log.1.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          3621 Dec  5 01:37 access_log.10.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          6839 Dec  4 01:37 access_log.11.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          2904 Dec  3 01:48 access_log.12.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          2320 Dec  2 01:35 access_log.13.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          5746 Dec  1 09:35 access_log.14.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          4650 Nov 30 13:42 access_log.15.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          4436 Nov 29 01:38 access_log.16.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          6098 Nov 28 01:41 access_log.17.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          3198 Nov 27 01:39 access_log.18.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 www      www          4101 Nov 26 01:40 access_log.19.gz
...

clearly, this means i need to configure
wwwstat to access the files in OLD if i
want to generate a report for stats covering
the last month, or last n days. but, i'm
just not proficient (yet!) with Perl to
make this work. i know i need to use
pattern matching in order for wwwstat to
be able to search all of the neccessary
gzip'd access_log files, depending on how
i want to generate the appropriate report.

i do have the nutshell (O'Reily) book
for Perl 5. i've read the chapter
on pattern matching... in theory, i
understand how this should work. i've
also looked at other portions of wwwstat
to get ideas for how similar pattern
matching was accomplished. this is what
i've tried so far:

# Specify the default location of your access log

    $DefaultLog = '/home/www/vs/httpd.soleilmoon/logs/OLD/access_log(.(*.(gz)))';

however, as may be obvious to some, this
isn't working. i am getting the following
error:

Error opening /home/www/vs/httpd.soleilmoon/logs/OLD/access_log(.(*.(.gz))): No such file or directory

ok... i've also tried the following:

.../access_log((.*?)(.gz))';

but this doesn't work either.

can anyone give me some clues/pointers?
what am i doing wrong? how can i figure
out how to do this right?

i'm not subscribed to this mailing list,
so if you could reply to me off-list,
it would be much appreciated.

thanks!