Safe Penetration Testing Labs · intermediate · ~10 min

Parsing server logs

Pull structured fields out of access log lines.

Lesson

Common Log Format:

127.0.0.1 - frank [10/Oct/2000:13:55:36 -0700] "GET /apache_pb.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2326

For each line: IP, identifier, user, timestamp, request line (quoted), status, size. A small C parser extracts these fields with fgets + character-by-character splitting. Useful for incident analysis on your own server logs.