filtering bot IPs is the hardest part because those
user agents change every single day. i usually just pipe my grep output into
awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nrto see which addresses are hitting the logs most frequently. once you identify the heavy hitters, you can add them to a blacklist or a specific exclude flag in your command. its way more efficient than trying to manually spot patterns in a massive text file. do you use any specific
automated scripts to keep that bot list updated? otherwise, youre just chasing shadows every time a new crawler pops up.