You can combine multiple commands through piping to not only search through big log files but to display the search result in a well-organized output. For example, using grep with nl and tail, you can find out when was the last few times a specific file was requested on your web server, as shown below: $ nl /var/log/apache/mywebsite.log | grep target-file.jpg | tail -n 5 The above command will show the last file times target-file.jpg was requested on your web server.