URL Status

In the url_status.pl Perl script, we determine and report the status of a given URL.

We use several subroutines from the LWP::Simple module to fetch and process web pages.  LWP--"Library for World Wide Web in Perl"--is a set of Perl modules providing an application programming interface (API) to the World-Wide Web.  For more information on LWP, visit search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lib/LWP.pm.

The getstore() subroutine gets a document and stores it in a file. The return value is the HTTP response code.

Unless we successfully fetched the document--the HTTP status code is 200 (HTTP_OK) (or some other status code signifying success) and we were able to store the document in a local file (the file size is non-zero; note that we zero out the file before attempting the fetch)--we print the status code and the URL.  (For successful fetches, we report nothing.)  For example, url_status.pl might report:

# /usr/local/bin/url_status.pl http://pikt.org/foo.html /tmp/junk.url_status
404 http://pikt.org/foo.html

where 404 is the HTTP response code for "URL not found" (HTTP_NOT_FOUND).

The script follows.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

if (@ARGV == 2) {
        my $url = $ARGV[0];
        my $fil = $ARGV[1];
        system("/bin/cp /dev/null $fil");
        my $stat = getstore($url, $fil);
        unless (is_success($stat) && (-s $fil)) {
                printf "%s %s\n", $stat, $url;
        }
}

url_status.pl is used by CheckBrokenLinksExternal and other Pikt scripts.

For more examples, see Samples.