What Big Brother is notIntroductionWhat is Big Brother?

What is Big Brother?

Big Brother allows you to keep an eye on your World Wide Web links. It is essential for webmasters and HTML authors who wish to make sure that the links contained in their pages are up-to-date; a chore which quickly gets out of hand without an automated tool! It is also invaluable to those who maintain a large list of bookmarks, since it can easily be used to check bookmark files.

Big Brother is distributed in source code, written in the Objective Caml language; it should compile "out of the box" on most Unix-based systems. Binaries for Windows 95/NT and RedHat Linux (i386) may also be available from the author's Web site. The whole program, including its source code, is placed in the public domain.

This version of Big Brother is a command-line tool. Putting a graphic interface--possibly written in a different programming language--on top of it should be reasonably easy. I no longer have time to do it, so if you're a programmer, think about it! Currently, the simplest way to use Big Brother is to sit down and write a one-line script (also known as batch file) to run Big Brother with appropriate options for your site. Once this is done, just run the script whenever you want to check your site.

In short, Big Brother...

Big Brother watches your documents and reports all mistakes--hence its name!


François Pottier, May 5, 2004

What Big Brother is notIntroductionWhat is Big Brother?