As long as there are people, there will be a log file of some sort. Examples of this are the cave paintings of great hunts and images of times gone past, the iconic symbols of hieroglyphics that tell the story of Ramses the Great, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and even hotel registers of days gone by. All are logs of something, recording of events. The log files in your web server are just the same. They record events and activities, and leave a footprint of your intended and unintended guests for you to follow.

"LOG FILES" cover a wide variety of record keeping. They can be security logs showing who logged in and when. They may be application logs, such as the Windows applications log, that show what an application is doing, and so on. They can be referrer or website log files, which in the case of Apache show information about visitors to the site.

You can use log files for a variety of things ranging from tracking visitors to improving your search engine ranking, all the way...