Python - retrieving info from a syslog file

Question

I have been asked to write a program using python for an assignment.

I have been given a syslog file and I have to find things out about it

How do I find out how many attempts were made to login to the root account?

Any advice would be highly appreciated as I am very new to python and completely lost!

Answer 1

something like this

#open the file , can be /var/log/messages, /var/log/maillog etc as defined in your system
f=open("mysyslogfile")
count=0 
#go through the file
for line in f:
   if "<unique pattern for checking root account login>" in line:
       count+=1
#close the file
f.close()
print "total count: " ,count