the various RSS directories and RSS srvices drop you data about the number of subscribers into your access_log files so does yahoo for example drop EACH day for each feed the number of subscribers and number of views into your access_log. just study the access_log and the webmaster/RSS sections of all RSS services using your RSS feeds - then grab the data from your access_log files a Yahoo data drop into your access_log may look as below: 66.218.65.52 - - [23/Mar/2004:08:13:30 -0800] "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 236; views 36994)" hence with your bash you search the log files for: zgrep YahooFeedSeeker to get the data YahooFeedSeeker gives you. other RSS subscription services have similar syntax - just read all data available when you register your RSS feeds with all RSS directories a google search rss howto may help further