What does HTTP code 172 mean?

Question

browsing access logs, sometimes I see

"POST / HTTP/1.0" 200

which should be OK

but other times I see

"POST / HTTP/1.0" 200 172

What does the 172 next to 200 mean?

Also, I see a few with 7250, or 44

Answer 1

That is a post to the access log, which by default is formatted like this:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common

Where %b is your elusive '172', the size of the response in bytes. see this site.

Answer 2

The last entry indicates the size of the object returned to the client, not including the response headers. If no content was returned to the client, this value will be "-".

From: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/logs.html#accesslog, Section Common Log Format

Answer 3

According to Ken Quon at this link:

For default Apache log files, that would be the size of the object (number of bytes) returned to the client, not including the response headers. If no content was returned to the client, this value will be "-".