Python - How can I open a file and specify the offset in bytes?

Question

I\'m writing a program that will parse an Apache log file periodically to log it\'s visitors, bandwidth usage, etc..

The problem is, I don\'t want to open the log an

Answer 1

If your logfiles fit easily in memory (this is, you have a reasonable rotation policy) you can easily do something like:

log_lines = open('logfile','r').readlines()
last_line = get_last_lineprocessed() #From some persistent storage
last_line = parse_log(log_lines[last_line:])
store_last_lineprocessed(last_line)

If you cannot do this, you can use something like (see accepted answer's use of seek and tell, in case you need to do it with them) Get last n lines of a file with Python, similar to tail