For SEO purposes, we typically have to analyze server logs to understand what the heck robots are actually doing on our site – sometimes, you’ll get a bunch of individual files from your hosting company, which makes getting all of the data needlessly laborious. For those of you Windows fans, this is how you can easily combine several log files into one file for easy importing into your favourite log analyzer, or even Excel.
Steps
1) Stick all of your server log files into one folder, copy the path to the folder (CTRL + C)
2) Click on the Start button, type CMD (On Windows 8? Poor you, go get your start button back!)
3) Type in “cd” (without quotes), space bar, then right click in the window and choose Paste. For example, I put my .log files in C:\logfiles so my command would be cd C:\logfiles
4) Now we can combine all the files together, There are a few different ways of doing this, but I prefer to select the exact format of files I want to combine. Call me anal, meh. You can see below that all of my files have a .log extension:
5) I use the TYPE command because the COPY command might not work if the files are in use somewhere, i.e. it’s just easier. To combine all of my files into one, I’ll do this: type *.log > biglogfile.log. This means I’m selecting any file (*) with a .log extension and copying (>) into one file (biglogfile.log). Go ahead and press enter and let the computer do it’s thang.
6) Boom…done. This will work with any file type and copying into a different file format – if you’re stuck, go see this thread
If any Mac users stumbled onto this article, I’m sorry but I’m allergic to Apple. I’m sure it’s easy enough..