NAME

link-report - report status of links using databases

DESCRIPTION

This program goes through an entire database of links and reports information about those links which match given criteria. It can optionally relate these to the locations of these links in files. It can give the output in several formats.

No actions are carried out to get further information than that which is in the database. This means that if a URI isn't listed in the link database, a warning is printed, but nothing else.

Distributed along with this program is a file for emacs which can use this to build a list of files for editing called link-report-dired. This can be very useful for fixing all broken links.

SELECTING LINKS TO REPORT

This bit is where we really miss in the design by not doing it against an SQL database. When (and if) that comes then we can add alot more power here more simply.

There are three modes for selection

by URI
by regex on the URI --uri-include --uri-exclude
by regex on the page name --page-include --page-exclude

These select which links are to be examined. Then there are options on the state of the link which choose which links to actually put out information about.

By default redirected and broken links are output. If any of these options are called then only the specified links are output.

--all-links: print out links in all states
--not-perfect: print out all links which were broken even on one check.
--redirected: print out links which were redirected

CONTROLLING THE REPORT FORMAT

The list of broken links can be put out in several formats. By defualt it is in plain text with a description of the problem and a list of broken pages following under each link. Alternatively other formats are possible. These are selected through command line options as follows.

--long-list: Instead of listing the urls of the pages where broken links are, this converts each link to a file name and does a listing of the file.
--html: This outputs a basic HTML format report which is otherwise similar to the default text report.
--uri-report: This report simply lists URIs of the selected links from LinkControllers database. This provides a better format for interfacing to other programs.

TODO

Much detailed control of the kind of links reported should be provided (e.g. how many times detected broken etc.). This should be done as a more advanced database system is integrated.

If there's any specific, reasonably simple, reporting option you would like added then please send a request to the bug reporting address explaining what this report would be used for.

BUGS