As I have some huge bookmark collections (e.g. this) I needed software for some automatic way to find any broken or stale links. There are some payware products out there, some even quite nice, but most of them lacked essential features or were written for a much bigger job than mine. However, the biggest problem with all those commercial solutions was their price tag, because I won't spend much money on such a simple job as detecting broken links.

I found some online link checking sites as well. Some sites did nearly exactly what I wanted. The problem here is a payware problem again. Most sites offered their full-featured full-fledged link checker for a small fee I was not willing to pay (ok, call me stingy).

The open source or otherwise free tools I found lacked functionality. The first attempt was a shell script based mainly on wget features. It basically worked the way I wanted it to, but that's all you could say about this staying positive. The second version was written in Perl and got me somewhere, but lacked some most basic features, too. That's were I met Ruby (the language, of course!). After some first try and error with the new language, I finally had the solution I always wanted to have: linkcheck

It can

My TODO list is quite big right now, but the most badly wanted features are in.

Download the latest tarball: linkcheck-1.10.tar.gz