5. Interfacing to other programs

Probably not all of your links are directly in web pages. If this is the case, it's still possible to use LinkController to check those links, but it won't be possible to use the repair facilities.

In this case, you have to generate the list of URIs you want checked yourself. This should be a file with one URI per line. Then extract-links can be used to import those links into LinkControllers database. For example, if you had put those links into the file `links' the following command would import them.

extract-links --in-url-list=links

Now, when you want to report on your links you can give the links file as an argument to link-report and it will only report those links which are in your file. This can be done with the following command

link-report --url-file=links

The usual options can be given to control which links are reported for example `--all-links' to list all links (see section F.1 Invoking link-report).

Another possibility for interfacing to programs is to use output from LinkController to automatically remove links from your web pages. That would be a very suitable solution, for example, if you keep a list of links to other related pages, but don't mind if some of them disappear temporarily.

In this case, it's probably best to use the link-report option for machine oriented output `--uri-report' and to choose either the `--broken' report for deleting links or the `--good'(3) option to choose which links should be shown on your web pages. For example, run something like the following each night from your `.crontab' file.

link-report --url-file=links --uri-report --broken \ | automatic-link-deleter

You should probably mail someone with the information that the link has been deleted so that if there's an easy way to fix it they can do that.