Top Command Line Tips: Apache Access Log

I said I should do some top command line tips. So I thought I'd start with some useful Apache access log monitoring and analysis commands.
These can come in useful if odd things are happening on your websever and maybe you think there are dodgy spiders or your need to only see requests from your IP, that kind of thing.

Assumptions
I'm assuming the path to your access log is /var/log/apache/access.log. So adjust if it's different.
Also assuming your access file's LogFormat is 'combined' and that you actually have permission to view the logs.

Commands Overview
Commands and options we'll be using are:

Top 5 Command Line Tip Posts

Linux CLI cheat sheet from Pixel Beat

I'm a big fan of 'Top X Command Line Tips' type posts and I keep meaning to get around to doing my own I've now done my first couple on Apache Access log tips and Top 10 Shortcuts. In the meantime I thought I'd share 5 of my favourite. Numbered but not really in any order.

Actually my favourite of these is 9 ways to recover your screen. that has come in useful countless times.

Reduce The Risk of Human Error on Live Servers

This is another quick and easy tip, this time help to reduce human error when working between live, development and staging environments.

In short the tip is to visually distinguish between live/staging/dev environments; the idea being that you don't accidentally run something on the live environment instead of staging or testing. Assuming you're connecting via SSH, you should be able to configure your console program to use a background image and you should be able to customise your command prompt.