If you’re a web site administrator, you need a tool that can test every link on your site to see if it’s working. That’s the job LinkChecker has been doing since the project was first registered on SourceForge.net 10 years ago.
LinkChecker outdoes other similar tools because it offers complete support for not only http: URLs, but also ftp:, telnet:, mailto:, news:, and local files. It also provides three different user interfaces: command line, graphical user interface, and web front end.
German developer Bastian Kleineidam began work on LinkChecker when he grew tired of clicking manually on links on his web sites to check them. He wrote the utility in Python because it gave him a chance to improve his skills with that language in a real, useful project.
Kleineidam offers a tip for advanced users: You can run LinkChecker as a cron job. “Just use the --no-status option and configure it to not print the intro and outro text blurb in the configuration file. Then you only get a message from cron if there is a broken link.”
The developer plans to work on an improved GUI for the next release of the application, but the code is on the back burner while Kleineidam grapples with a time-consuming new issue – baby daughter Amelie.