At 09:15 AM 12/27/2006 -0500, Bill Brown wrote:
>Since the goal of the original request was to see the last post in each 
>list, could you have jsut done "tail -50" (or whatever number would mnake 
>sense) on each log and processed the results of that rather than looking 
>at the beginning of the log since that info would be superceded by 
>subsequent lines in the log?

Depending on how granular you want your report to be, it may not even be necessary to look inside the files.  If it's sufficient to know that the last post was in, i.e., March 2004, then the file names will usually be enough.

That falls through if you have single or yearly archives of course.

Another option would be to run a search command that returns only the last post.  For example the command

search * in lstsrv-l.last1

gives me 

Item #    Date    Time  Lines   Subject
------    ----    ----  -----   -------
024769 2006-12-27 09:26    43   Re: Server-wide usage stats

To order a copy of this posting, send the following command:

                    GETPOST LSTSRV-L 24769

and that's Christopher's post from just a moment ago...

Nathan