urlmon 4.0 review

urlmon is a Perl application that makes a connection to a web site and records the last_modified time for that url. Upon subsequen

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 43K Developer: Jeremy Impson

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urlmon is a Perl application that makes a connection to a web site and records the last_modified time for that url.

Upon subsequent calls, it will check the url again, this time comparing the information to the previously recorded times.

Since the last_modified data is not required to be given by HTTP (it's optional) and is non-existent for ftp, urlmon will then take an MD5 checksum.

Filtering is possible, so that URLs whose content is always changing (due to server-side parsing or some equivalent, as often used in rotating adverstisements) can accurately be monitored.

Requirements:
Perl5 or greater

Modules:
MD5
NET
MIME-Base64
HTML-Parser
LWP

What's New in This Release:
Added DISPLAY variable to list of allowed tags in the urlmonrc file (thanks to Bill Dyess for the patch). This allows the user to set what string gets printed by urlmon when a give URL has changed. More information and an example can be had in URLMONRC.txt
The last release of urlmon allowed you to define your own filters (see FILTERS.txt), but it didn't give an easy way to do so without modifying the urlmon code itself. Version 4.0 allows you to manipulate the filtercode array by defining a library file in the urlmonrc file with the CODE= tag. See FILTERS.txt for more information.
When urlmon runs in parallel, it needs to communicate the updated URL information from the child monitoring processes to the parent executive process. Previous versions used temporary files. This version has experimental SysV IPC support, to avoid having to use /tmp files, something I though was ugly as well as a potential security problem.
Fixed usage of escape and unescape when passing data from children to parent.
Added debug() routine so that debugging statements can be controlled more granularly. Goodbye '$opt_d and print ...' statements.
Modified print_urls ('-p') to print more of information kept in urlmonrc file.