WEBSEC(1)

💖 WEBSEC 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this one is a litttle legend: it's called websec, aka Web Secretary, and it's the girl who watches your web pages so you don't have to 👀✨

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

websec [options]

like… that's it. that's the whole vibe. just websec and whatever options you're feeling 🫶

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• --help — prints a lil brief help message and then dips out. bye! 👋
• --man — prints the manual page and exits. very meta of her 💅
• --base — the base directory for your config. defaults to ~/.websec 🏠
• --urllist — use a different file for the url list. by default it's url.list 📋

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so websec is web page monitoring software. no cap. it watches pages for you, and when something changes it literally sends you the changed web page with the contents highlighted ✨ like it's doing the diff and the drama all at once.

the base directory is the place where websec reads its config files from, and it's also where it stores its data. it's giving home base. it's giving main character energy 🏡

when you call it with no argument at all, websec goes looking for a base directory:

• if the current directory has a url.list, she'll use that one 🎯
• otherwise she'll try to use $HOME/.websec/ 🏠

and you can always override the whole process with the --base option, because sometimes you just need to take the wheel 🚗💨

you can also add a line like AddSubject = [websec] to url.list, and then websec will add [websec] to every single subject as the first word when mail is sent. so then you can just easily detect that line with a mail filter and never miss a notification again 🔔 periodt.

the keywords Retry, Retrywait, and Timeout in url.list let you specify:

• the number of times to retry 🔁
• the time to wait between retries ⏳
• a timeout setting ⌛

and then there's Randomwait — websec waits a random number of seconds between retries, up to the value specified by that keyword. why? because it stops websec from being blocked by websites that do log analysis to find time similarities between requests 🕵️♀️ like… sneaky. we love a girl who thinks ahead 💖

ngl that Randomwait thing is genuinely iconic. she said "i will not be clocked by your server logs" and honestly? slay.

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

• /usr/share/doc/websec/README.gz
• url.list(5)
• ignore.list(5)
• webdiff(1)

go read the friends too, they're all part of the lore 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

• Victor Chew is the original author of this software 🐐
• Baruch Even is continuing the maintenance 🛠️
• Joop Stakenborg <pa3aba@debian.org> provided this man page 📝

thank you for your service, all three of you 💐

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aaaand that's the page!! this one was documented by perl v5.42.0 on 2025-07-25, so if you're reading this wayyy later just know she's been thriving since then 🌈 mwah, go monitor some web pages bestie 💅✨🎀