Using LinkController: Reporting

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# 7. Reporting Problems

The easiest way to find out which links are broken is to use the command line interface. The simplest report you can generate is just a list of all the known broken links. Do this like so:

    link-report

On the system I'm testing on right now, this gives:

    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/cgi
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/cgi/examples.html
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/curr
    ent/httpd_1.4_irix5.2.Z
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/setup/PreExec.html
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/curr
    ent/httpd_1.4_linux.Z
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/setup/PreExec.html
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/curr
    ent/httpd_1.4_osf3.0.Z
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/setup/PreExec.html
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/curr
    ent/httpd_1.4_solaris2.4.Z
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/setup/PreExec.html
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/curr
    ent/httpd_1.4_solaris2.4.tar.Z
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/setup/PreCompiled.html
    Sorry, couldn't find info for url file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/U
    nix/ncsa_httpd/current/httpd_1.4_source.tar.Z
    please remember to check you have put it in full format
    broken:-       file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/httpd/Unix/ncsa_httpd/docu
    ments/usage.ps
            http://www.ippt.gov.pl/docs-1.4/postscript-docs/Overview.html
    ..etc...

Which just tells you which links are broken. (In this chapter examples are folded at the 70th row, so that they fit well on narrow screens and in TeX. I wanted to use real text rather than making something up.)

We also know which page they are broken on and can go and look at that on the World Wide Web or directly as a file on the server.

You can get a complete list of options for `link-report` (or any other program which is part of LinkController) using

    link-report -h

For more advanced reporting and editing of documents with broken links you may want to use the emacs interface (see section The Emacs Interface).

> 7.1 Email Reporting of Newly Broken Links |  |

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## 7.1 Email Reporting of Newly Broken Links

It's possible to arrange automatic reporting by email of links which have become newly broken. This is done by getting `test-link` to make a list of links that become broken using the $::link_stat_log variable (see section 2.3 Link Control Configuration Variables) and calling `link-report` to report on those links.

Typically, you may don't want to have a report every time that `test-link` runs, but probably once a day instead. In this case, run a script like the following from your crontab.

    #!/bin/sh
    STAT_LOG=$HOME/link-data/stat-log
    WORK=$STAT_LOG.work
    EMAIL=me@example.com
    mv $STAT_LOG  $WORK
    if [ -s $WORK ]
    then
       link-report --broken --url-file=$STAT_LOG --infostructure |
          mail -s "link-report for `date`" $EMAIL
    fi

Every time that this script is run, it will rename the status change logfile and then mail a report with all of the new broken links to the specified email address.

In future this feature may be folded into `link-report` directly.

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This document was generated by Michael De La Rue on December, 30 2001 using texi2html