Best way to count file downloads on a website

Question

It\'s surprising how difficult it is to find a simple, concise answer to this question:

1. I have a file, foo.zip, on my website
2. What can I do to find ou

Answer 1

With the answer "The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question."

This is additional:

$hit_count = @file_get_contents('count.txt');
$hit_count++;
@file_put_contents('count.txt', $hit_count);

header('Location: http://www.example.com/download/pics.zip'); // redirect to the real    file to be downloaded

Here count.txt is a simple plain text file, storing the counter info. You can save it in a database table along with downloadable_filename.ext also.