From: Joseph McDonald <joe@...>
Date: 2002-02-13T04:27:00+09:00
Subject: weird output


So I have this little script to watch hits per second by tailing the
access log:

alog = "access_log"
$stdout.sync=true
lines = 0                                          
lasttime = 0                                       
IO.popen("tail -f #{alog}").each do |line|
  lines += 1                                       
  t = Time.now.to_i                                
  if t >= lasttime + +5                            
    d = `date`                                     
    d.chop!                                        
    puts "#{d}\t#{t - lasttime}\t#{lines}\t#{lines/5}" 
    lasttime = t                                   
    lines = 0                                      
  end                                              
end

and it works fine for 99% of the time, but every once in a while I'll
get output that looks like this:

Tue Feb 12 10:43:34 PST 2002    5       155     31
Tue FebTue Feb 12 10:44:13 PST 2002     5       200     40             
Tue Feb 12 10:44:18 PST 2002    5       220     44

Or:
Tue Feb 12 10:44:38 PST 2002    5       150     30
Tue Feb 1209 PST 2002   5       206     41 
Tue Feb 12 10:44:14 PST 2002    5       204     40

See how the output of `date` is somehow munged and we are missing some
time periods?  Any idea how this could happen?

I know, I know, I should just use Time.now() instead of `date`, but
now I'm curious.

thanks,
-joe