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 runing 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 rerievial
                  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 notfication 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 sybols 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.  /var/lib/htdig/db.docdb  Stores
              data     about     each    document    (title,    url,    etc.).
              /var/lib/htdig/db.words.db,  /var/lib/htdig/db.words.db_weakcmpr
              Record     which     documents     each    word    occurs    in.
              /var/lib/htdig/db.excerpts Stores start of each document to show
              context of matches.

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)