NAME

ck4up - Check for Updates, a utility to monitor web pages for updates

SYNOPSIS

ck4up [options] [<regexp> ...]

DESCRIPTION

ck4up is a small command-line utility, written in ruby, primarily intended for CRUX ports maintainers to watch http and ftp sites for updates, but may also be useful for others.

ck4up scans through a configuration file, fetches the listed URLs from the web, computes the md5sum of the page, and compares the value with one stored in a gdbm database. If both differ a message will be written to the standard output.

To improve performance, ck4up is multi-threaded. A configurable number of threads fetches pages in parallel. The default setting is a maximum of 20 threads and can be changed at the top of the script (variable Threads_max).

Regular expressions can be applied to each page in the event that ck4up produces repetitive diff messages. For example, if daily snapshots and a web counter are on the same page.

To simplify maintenance of the configuration file, a kind of macro-expansion can be used.

OPTIONS

-d, --debug: Run ck4up in debug mode. All fetched pages will be written to the standard output. This is especially useful when combined with a regexp to limit the number of pages to process.
-k, --keep: Keep md5 values, don't update the database.
-v, --verbose: Verbose mode. Print a message also for unchanged pages.
-h, --help: Print a short help message and exit.
-p, --parseonly: Parse configuration file, expand macros and print lines matched by <regexp>. Do not fetch any remote data.
-c, --cleandb: Removes unused entries from the ck4up database.
-f <file>, --config <file>: Use alternative configuration from <file> instead of the default ~/.ck4up/ck4up.conf. ck4up creates a database with the same full pathname but the extension replaced by .dbm.
<regexp>: Process only configuration-lines matching <regexp>. If more than one expression is given, all of them are or'ed to build a regular expression.

CONFIGURATION

The configuration file for ck4up contains lines with macro definitions and lines defining URLs to check for updates. Blank lines and lines beginning with a pound-sign, which are considered comments, are ignored. Spaces at the beginning of definition-lines are not allowed.
The default location for the ck4up configuration file is ~/.ck4up/ck4up.conf.

<name> <type> <url> [<regexp>]

Lines starting with a valid character in the range [a-zA-Z] are URL lines, defining the web-pages you would like to check for updates. <name> is a symbolic name for the URL, md5 is the only valid entry for <type> at the moment, <url> is the URL of the web-site, <regexp> is an optionally extended regular expression. Don't use spaces in regexps, but \s instead.

Examples:

apache md5 http://www.apache.de/dist/httpd/ httpd-2[0-9.]*
uw-imap md5 ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/

<@[A-Za-z0-9_]*@> <string> [<string>]

Lines starting with @ define macros for later use. A system macro @NAME@, which is the <name> of the URL line, can be used in other macro definitions. This is handy if many URLs follow a common syntax. See the examples for @GNU@ below. Macro expansion is done recursively, allowing macros to be nested. See the @SF@ example which works for many but not all sourceforge project pages.

EXAMPLE

Example of a configuration file containing URL and macro definitions:

@TAR@ @NAME@-.*?.tar.[bgx]z2?

@SUN@ http://mirrors.sunsite.dk
@GNU@ http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/@NAME@ @TAR@

@SF_RE@ /files/@NAME@/[.0-9]+|@TAR@
@SF@ http://sourceforge.net/projects/@NAME@/files/@NAME@ @SF_RE@

apache md5 http://www.apache.de/dist/httpd/ httpd-2[0-9.]*
exim md5 @SUN@/exim/exim/exim4/ @TAR@
gawk md5 @GNU@
hdparm md5 @SF@
uw-imap md5 ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/ imap-200.?[a-z]

PROXY

If a environment variable HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy is set with a valid URI, e.g. http://server.localnet:3128/, ck4up make use of the proxy for the HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

FILES

~/.ck4up/ck4up.conf - configuration-file
~/.ck4up/ck4up.dbm - gdbm database to store the md5 hashes

AUTHOR

Juergen Daubert <jue@jue.li>