HOW TO: Take a quick glance at errors from a project.

PHP records all errors to a file named error_log

I needed to look at the status of a project on two servers to see what errors were being thrown.

This command line shows the top 20 errors and how often they occurred within the last 1000 errors..
tail -1000 error_log | awk -F ‘]’ ‘{print $4}’| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

Depending upon the load on your server, that could report on the errors in the last half hour, or across several days. In either case, it will give you a quick idea on where you should clean your code of warnings and notices and where you need to do some fixing… Just remember there’s no time line involved in the report. So the error messages could be from something already fixed.