Well we are doing a similar job in this way:

fork && exit;           ### making a daemon
open FILE, "ACCESS";
for (;;) {
 while (<FILE>){
   $lines++;
 }
print "$lines to somewhere, maybe to another file";
$lines=0;
sleep 3600;
}
[download]

This script works as a deamon.
You can write the numbers to another file,
or maybe you can blow this script off, to generate a new webpage with all the statstics you need :)

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--the good, the bad and the physi--
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[download]