Best way to count file downloads on a website

With the answer "The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question."

This is additional:

$hit_count = @file_get_contents('count.txt');
$hit_count++;
@file_put_contents('count.txt', $hit_count);

header('Location: http://www.example.com/download/pics.zip'); // redirect to the real    file to be downloaded

Here count.txt is a simple plain text file, storing the counter info. You can save it in a database table along with downloadable_filename.ext also.

Or you could parse the log file if you don't need the data in realtime.

grep foo.zip /path/to/access.log | grep 200 | wc -l

In reply to comment:

The log file also contains bytes downloaded, but as someone else pointed out, this may not reflect the correct count if a user cancels the download on the client side.

The simplest way would probably be instead of linking directly to the file, link to a script which increments a counter and then forwards to the file in question.