NAME

       htdig - retrieve HTML documents for ht://Dig search engine

SYNOPSIS

       htdig [options]

DESCRIPTION

       Htdig  retrieves HTML documents using the HTTP protocol and gathers information from these
       documents which can later be used to search these documents. This program can be  referred
       to as the search robot.

OPTIONS

       -      Get  the list of URLs to start indexing from standard input. This will override the
              default parameter start_url specified in the config file  and the file supplied  to
              the -m option.

       -a     Use  alternate work files. Tells htdig to append .work to database files, causing a
              second copy of the database to be built. This allows the original files to be  used
              by htsearch during the indexing run.

       -c configfile
              Use the specified configfile instead of the default.

       -h maxhops
              Restrict the dig to documents that are at most maxhops links away from the starting
              document. This only works if option -i is also given.

       -i     Initial. Do not use any old databases. Old databases will be erased before  running
              the program.

       -m filename
              Minimal  run.  Only index the URLs given in the file filename, ignoring all others.
              URLs in the file should be formatted one URL per line.

       -s     Print statistics about the dig after completion.

       -t     Create an ASCII version of the document database. This database is  easy  to  parse
              with other programs so that information can be extracted from it for purposes other
              than searching. One could gather some interesting statistics from this database.

              Fieldname                           Value
                  u       URL
                  t       Title
                  a       State
                          (0 normal, 1 not found, 2 not indexed, 3 obsolete)
                  m       Time of last modification reported by the server
                  s       Document Size in bytes
                  H       Excerpt of the document
                  h       Meta Description
                  l       Time of last retrieval
                  L       Count of links in the document or  of outgoing links
                  b       Number of links to the document, also called
                          incoming links or backlinks
                  c       Hop count of this document
                  g       Signature of this document
                          (used to detect duplicates)
                  e       E-Mail address to use for a notification from htnotify
                  n       Date on which such notification is sent
                  S       Subject of the notifcation message
                  d       The text of Incoming links pointing to this document
                          (e.g. <a href="docURL">description</a>)

                  A       Anchors in the document (i.e. <A NAME=...)

       -u username:password
              Tells htdig to send the supplied username and password with each HTTP request.  The
              credentials  will  be encoded using the ´Basic´ authentication method. There HAS to
              be a colon (:) between the username and password.

       -v     Verbose mode. This increases the verbosity of the program. Using  more  than  2  is
              probably  only  useful for debugging purposes. The default verbose mode (using only
              one -v) gives a nice progress report while  digging.  Please  consult  the  section
              below on the exact format of the progress report.

       FORMAT OF THE PROGRESS REPORT GIVEN IN VERBOSE MODE
              A  line is shown for each URL, with 3 numbers before the URL and some symbols after
              the URL. The first number is the number of documents parsed so far, the  second  is
              the DocID for this document, and the third is the hop count of the document (number
              of hops from one of the start_url documents). Signification of the symbols  printed
              after the url:

              "*" is printed for a link already visited

              "+" is printed for a new link just queued

              "-"  is output for a link rejected for any of a number of reasons. To find out what
              those reasons are, you need to run htdig with at least 3 -v options, i.e. -vvv.

       If there are no "*", "+" or "-" symbols after the URL, it doesn't mean  the  document  was
       not  parsed  or was empty, but only that no links to other documents were found within it.
       With more verbose output,  these  symbols  will  get  interspersed  in  several  lines  of
       debugging output.

       FILES

       /etc/htdig/htdig.conf
              The default configuration file.

SEE ALSO

       Please   refer  to  the  HTML  pages  (in  the  htdig-doc  package)  /usr/share/doc/htdig-
       doc/html/index.html and the manual pages  htdigconfig(8)  ,  htmerge(1)  ,  htnotify(1)  ,
       htsearch(1) and rundig(1) for a detailed description of ht://Dig and its commands.

AUTHOR

       This  manual  page  was  written  by Christian Schwarz, modified by Stijn de Bekker. It is
       updated and maintained by Robert Ribnitz and based on the HTML documentation of ht://Dig.

                                           21 July 1997                                  htdig(1)