good day netwallah,

appreciate much of your help here ....

but it produce no result other than the header that reads the following :

IDS              TIME                    OCCURANCES
===================================================
[download]

am I missing something here ?

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::Local;
my $infile = 'input.2008-01-01.log';
my $outfile = 'output.2008-01-01.log';
my $channel = 'seven';
my($fh_out, $fh);
open($fh, '<', $infile) or die "Could not open logfile: $!";
open($fh_out, '>', $outfile) or die "Could not open outfile: $!";
my %track;
while (<$fh>){
  next unless /$channel/;
  my ($date,$channel,$id) = /^(\S+\s\S+).+channel = (\w+).+id = (\w+)/
+;
  my $time = dateconv($id);
  my $prevtime = $track{$id}{TIME};
  $track{$id}{TIME}=$time;
  $track{$id}{DATE}=$date;
  if ($prevtime and $time - $prevtime > 3600){
     $track{$id}{COUNT}++;
     print $fh_out "$id\t$date\t$track{$id}{COUNT}\n"    ;
  }
}
sub dateconv{
  my $d = shift;
  my %month = qw[jan 1 feb 2 mar 3 apr 4 may 5 jun 6 jul 7
                 aug 8 sep 9 oct 10 nov 11 dec 12];
  my @p = $d=~/(\d+)-(\w+)-(\d+)\s(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)/;
  $p[1]=$month{ lc $p[1]  } - 1;
  return  timelocal(@p[5,4,3,2,1,0]);
          #timelocal($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year);
}
my $header=<<HEADER;
ID               TIME                    OCCURANCES
=====================================================
HEADER
print $fh_out $header;
close $fh_out;
close $fh;
[download]