Split access.log file by dates using command line tools

Pure bash, making one pass through the access log:

while read; do
    [[ $REPLY =~ \[(..)/(...)/(....): ]]

    d=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
    m=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
    y=${BASH_REMATCH[3]}

    #printf -v fname "access.apache.%s_%s_%s.log" ${BASH_REMATCH[@]:1:3}
    printf -v fname "access.apache.%s_%s_%s.log" $y $m $d

    echo "$REPLY" >> $fname
done < access.log

One way using awk:

awk 'BEGIN {
    split("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec ", months, " ")
    for (a = 1; a <= 12; a++)
        m[months[a]] = sprintf("%02d", a)
}
{
    split($4,array,"[:/]")
    year = array[3]
    month = m[array[2]]

    print > FILENAME"-"year"_"month".txt"
}' incendiary.ws-2009

This will output files like:

incendiary.ws-2010-2010_04.txt
incendiary.ws-2010-2010_05.txt
incendiary.ws-2010-2010_06.txt
incendiary.ws-2010-2010_07.txt

Against a 150 MB log file, the answer by chepner took 70 seconds on an 3.4 GHz 8 Core Xeon E31270, while this method took 5 seconds.

Original inspiration: "How to split existing apache logfile by month?"