This blog has some good tips about parsing rails logs with sed/awk. http://www.caboo.se/articles/2007/7/2/sed-awk-for-rails-devs I'll do something like {code} tail -1000 production.log | grep ^Completed | awk ' {print "[" $3 "] - " $0 }' | sort -n | tail {code} Just to see some recent requests. 2007-12-15 19:19:57.0 2007-12-15 19:16:37.0