Big Brother Manual -- Checking your bookmarks

Checking your bookmarks

Checking your bookmarks

Most browsers store your bookmarks in a special HTML file. The name and location of that file depend on your particular brand of operating system and of browser. When using Netscape Navigator under Unix, it is called bookmarks.html and located in a directory called .netscape inside your home directory. Under Windows NT, it might be C:\Program Files\Netscape\Navigator\bookmark.htm. If you are using another setup, you'll need to experiment to discover this information. (Let me know what you find out, and I'll add it to the manual.)

Which options to use? Since bookmarks usually point to external sites, you won't need any mappings. Recursion should be off, because you're only interested in knowing whether these documents exist, not whether the links they contain are valid. As always, we must avoid overloading servers, so we use -gentle to slow down Big Brother. To obtain human-readable results, we request Big Brother to store a report in HTML format using -ohtml. So, the command will look like this, under Unix:

bigbro               \
  -local             \
  -remote            \
  -gentle 5          \
  -ohtml report.html \
  -failures          \
  -fragments         \
  $HOME/.netscape/bookmarks.html

(The \ characters at the end of each line are used to indicate that this is a single command, even though it is written on several lines for clarity.) You can store this command in a script to avoid typing it again and again. Also, it is easy to have the report mailed to you and the script run every week. Under Windows, your batch file might look like this:

bigbro               \
  -local             \
  -remote            \
  -gentle 5          \
  -ohtml report.htm  \
  -failures          \
  -fragments         \
  file://C:/Program%20Files/Netscape/Navigator/bookmark.htm

Note that I had to replace the space in "Program Files" with an escape sequence "%20", because spaces are illegal in URLs.

Of course, your situation might be slightly different. For instance, remember to specify a proxy if you need one. Also, if your bookmarks contain pointers to password-protected sites, you will have to give the password to Big Brother by using -realm, -user and -password. (Under Windows NT or Unix, you might then want to make the script unreadable to other users, so as to protect your privacy.)

François Pottier, May 5, 2004

Checking your bookmarks