Command Line Syntax

The generic syntax is:

 	webbot [ options ] [ URI [ keywords ] ]

Options

The order of the options is not important and options can in fact be specified on either side of any URI. Currently available options are:-

Getting Help

-v [ a | b | c | g | p | s | t | u ]

Verbose mode: Gives a running commentary on the program's attempts to read data in various ways. As the amount of verbose output is substantial, the -v option can now be followed by zero, one or more of the following flags (without space) in order to differentiate the verbose output generated:

• a: Anchor relevant information
• b: Bindings to local file system
• c: Cache trace
• g: SGML trace
• p: Protocol module information
• s: SGML/HTML relevant information
• t: Thread trace
• u: URI relevant information

The -v option without any appended options shows all trace messages. An example is "-vpt" showing thread and protocol trace messages

-version

Prints out the version number of the robot and the version number of libwww and exits.

Setting Constraints for Traversal

-depth [ n ]

Limit jumps to n hops from the start page. The n-1 link is checked using a HEAD request. The default value is 0 which means that only the start page is searched. A value of 1 will cause the start page and all pages directly linked from that start page to be checked.

-prefix [ URI ]

Define a URI prefix for all URIs - if they do not match the prefix then they are not checked. The rejected URIs can be logged to a separate file.

The following options are only available if you have linked against a regex library handling regular expressions.

-exclude [ regex ]

Allows you to define a regular expression of which URIs should be excluded from the traversal. The rejected URIs can be logged to a separate file. This can be used to exclude specific parts of the URI space, for example all URIs containing "/old/": -exclude "/old/"

-check [ regex ]

Check all URIs that match this regular expression with a HEAD method instead of a GET method. This can be used to verify links but avoiding downloading large distribution files like this: -check "\.gz$|\.Z$|\.zip$|, for example.

-include [ regex ]

Allows you to define a regular expression of which URIs should be included in the traversal

Checking Inlined Images

-img

Test include inlined images using a HEAD request

-saveimg

Saving the inlined images on local disk or pump them to a black hole. This is primarily to emulate a GUI client's behavior using the robot

-alt [ file ]

Specifies a Referer Log Format style log file of all inlined images without or with an empty an ALT tag.

-prefix [ URI ]

Define a URI prefix for all inlined image URIs - if they do not match the prefix then they are not checked. The rejected URIs can be logged to a separate file.

Logging Features

-404 [ file ]

Specifies a Referer Log Format style log file of all links resulting in a 404 (Not Found) status code

-l [ file ]

Specifies a Common Log File Format style log file with a list of visited documents and the result codes obtained.

-negotiated [ file ]

Specifies a log file of all URIs that where subject to content negotiation.

-referer [ file ]

Specifies a Referer Log Format style log file of which documents points to which documents

-reject [ file ]

Specifies a log file of all the URIs encountered that didn't fulfill the constraints for traversal.

Distribution and Statistics Features

-format [ file ]

Specifies a log file of which media types (content types) were encountered in the run and their distribution

-charset [ file ]

Specifies a log file of which charsets (content type parameter) were encountered in the run and their distribution

-hitcount [ file]

Specifies a log file of URIs sorted after how many times they were referenced in the run

-lm [ file]

Specifies a log file of URIs sorted after last modified date. This gives a good overview of the dynamics of the web site that you are checking.

-rellog [ file ]

Specifies a log file of any link relationship found in the HTML LINK tag (either the REL of the REV attribute) that has the relation specified in the -relation parameter (all relations are modelled by libwww as "forward"). For example "-rellog stylesheets-logfile.txt -relation stylesheet" will produce a log file of all link relationships of type "stylesheet". The format of the log file is

"<relationship> <media type> <from-URI> --> <to-URI>"

meaning that the from-URI has the forward relationship with to-URI.

-title [ file ]

Specifies a log file of URIs sorted after any title found either as an HTTP header or in the HTML.

Persistent Cache

-cache

Enable the libwww persistent cache

-cacheroot [ dir ]

Where should the cache be located? The default is /tmp/w3c-cache

-validate

Force validation using either the etag or the last-modified date provided by the server

-endvalidate

Force end-to-end validation by adding a max-age=0 cache control directive

Other Options

-delay [ n]

Specify the write delay in milliseconds for how long we can wait until we flush the output buffer when using pipelining. The default value is 50 ms. The longer delay, the bigger TCP packets but also longer response time.

-n

Non-interactive mode.

-nopipe

Do not use HTTP/1.1 pipelining. The default for this option can be set using the configure script under installation.

-o [ file ]

Redirects output to specified file. This mode forced non-interactive mode.

-q

Somewhat quit mode.

-Q

Really quit mode.

-r <file>

Rule file, a.k.a. configuration file. If this is specified, a rule file may be used to map URLs, and to set up other aspects of the behavior of the browser. Many rule files may be given with successive -r options, and a default rule file name may be given using the WWW_CONFIG environment variable.

-single

Single threaded mode. If this flag is set then the browser uses blocking, non interruptible I/O in interactive mode. Non-interactive mode always uses blocking I/O.

-ss

Print out date and time for start and stop for the job.

-timeout <n>

Timeout in seconds on sockets

URI

The URI is the hypertext address of the document at which you want to start the robot.

keywords

Any further command line arguments are taken as keywords. The first argument must refer to an index in this case. The index is searched for entries matching the keywords, and a list of matching entries is displayed.