Special thanks to Eldon Norton, who reviewed the source code and suggested ways to improve its efficiency. Analysis of user access log of a web server is helpful in many ways. For instance, an instructor who offers web-based courses can find out which students access the site more often, what pages are more popular, when the prime time is, and so on. It is only a text file and thus is difficult to read.
Today there are quite a few software tools for analyzing a user log.
On the other hand, some of them such as Andromedia, Whirl, Insight, and Internet Manager are more flexible but are extremely expensive. Second, SAS is available in many institutions. This write-up will illustrate how you can clean up the access log and present useful results on the Web. There are several ways to accomplish this task. After the link is established, SAS can read the data in the data step.