Replying to myself ...
On Fri, 25 Aug 2006, Richard.Hall wrote:
Greg,
On Fri, 25 Aug 2006, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:
Well, now I know how linecount works. I was hoping that it would let me track the number of lines in a file and spot changes over time. But this is not what line count is for -- it is intended to match some arbitrary subset of lines in a file, and then this is tracked via RRD as a "derived" value, meaning what is graphed is how the count changes over time, scaled into units per second. This is perfect if you want to watch the rate of login failures on your system, but not very useful for what I wanted.
So I will monitor changes in file size (which might show me changes), but cannot readily translate this into a line count.
So, an enhancement request -- add a "line count" as a file parameter, in addition to all the normal things that are available now?
If I'm remembering correctly what Henrik said about how linecount works (sorry, didn't keep the message), can't you do something like
totallines:.*
to make the pattern match every line of the file?
Doh! Obviously not - you want the total, not the rate of change. Apologies for the noise.
Richard