counter - 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 out how many people have accessed this file?
3. I could use Tomcat calls if necessary

Answer 1

Or you could parse the log file if you don't need the data in realtime.

grep foo.zip /path/to/access.log | grep 200 | wc -l

In reply to comment:

The log file also contains bytes downloaded, but as someone else pointed out, this may not reflect the correct count if a user cancels the download on the client side.