URL.LIST(5)

📦
version 1.9.0 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43

✨ URL.LIST ✨

okay bestie, welcome to section 5 of the User Contributed Perl Documentation — this is the url.list manual page, aka the glow-up guide for your websec url monitoring configuration 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

url.list — websec url monitoring configuration. she's the config file, she's the blueprint, she runs the whole monitoring empire 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so. the URL list is literally one or more sections separated by newlines ✨ you can totally have sections with no URL in them at all — those just update the defaults for all the subsequent blocks. slay, cascading configs, we love a chain reaction 👑

now, the required girlies: Name and Prefix are required, and you also need one of Email, EmailLink, and Program. everything else? completely optional. no pressure, no cap 🫶

the following parameters (case-sensitive, so watch that shift key) are recognized in each section:

  • URL — URL of web page to monitor 🔍
  • Name — Name of web site. Pages delivered to you will have the following format: "Name - Date (Day)" eg. "PC Magazine - 4 Sep 98 (Fri)" — it's giving personalized newsletter energy 💌
  • Prefix — Prefix of filenames for archive files of web pages created by Web Secretary 📁
  • Email — Comma-delimited list of email addresses to send highlighted pages to 📧
  • EmailLink — Comma-delimited list of email addresses to send URL of changed pages to 🔗
  • Program — application to call with the diff-file. special cases, and yes they are iconic: "mozilla", pages are opened in new tabs; "konqueror", pages are opened using "kfmclient openURL" 🌐
  • Auth — Authentication information in "username:password" format. Put "none" if no authentication needed 🔐
  • Diff — Put "none" if you want Web Secretary to always mail this page to you instead of checking for and highlighting changes in the page. Put "webdiff" if you want Web Secretary to check for changes. Put "htmldiff" to use a different implementation of HTML diff output. Note that you need to install the perl-modules Algorithm::Diff and HTML::Diff which are availabe on http://www.cpan.org/ for this to work 👀 (yes, "availabe", I said what I said, quoting the original fr fr)
  • Hicolor — Color used to highlight new or changed content. Currently, four colors are defined. They are: blue, pink, yellow and grey. You can also supply your own HTML color tag in the form "#rrggbb" 🎨
  • Ignore — Comma-delimited List of section names containing ignore keywords. There must be NO SPACES between delimiters and section names. The ignore sections and keywords are stored in a file called "ignore.list" 🚫
  • IgnoreURL — Comma-delimited List of section names containing ignore URLs. There must be NO SPACES between delimiters and section names. The ignore sections and keywords are stored in a file called "ignore.list" 🚫🔗
  • AsciiMarker — If set to 1 it will add ascii markers around the changes so that highlighting is noticeable in text mode too. Useful for text MUAs users 🖥️✨
  • Tmin — Every token containing <= Tmin words will not be highlighted for differences 🪶
  • Tmax — Every token containing >= Tmax words will not be checked for ignore keywords 🐘
  • Proxy — Specify proxy "http://your.proxy.here:portnum" if you are using one. (Alternatively, you can make use of the "http_proxy" environment variable) 🌉
  • ProxyAuth — Specify proxy authentication in "username:password" format. The code for this feature was contributed by Volker Stampa. big ups to Volker 🙌
  • MailFrom — The E-Mail address to send mail from, this can be left empty and the user used to run websec will be used 📮
  • ProgramDigest — If specified "true", websec does not open all changed pages separately with the application specified in "Program", but opens a summary page that contains links to all changed pages 📋
  • Digest — true|false or yes|no. This works only if EmailLink is specified. It consolidates all the changed URLs and sends them in one email 📬
  • UserAgent — The User-Agent that will be sent by the web client. This can be used to bypass servers that prevent access based on the user agent 🕵️♀️
  • DateFMT — Date format to use in e-mail messages, can be empty for no date. Set it to " - %Y-%m-%d" for ISO dates. This is perl format for dates 📅
  • RandomWait — Websec waits for a random number of seconds between retries up to the value specified by the RandomWait keyword. This is to prevent websec from being blocked by websites that perform log analysis to find time similarities between requests 🎲

any line which begins with a '#' is treated as comment and ignored 💬

if a section does not contain a URL entry, the values provided will be treated as the default for the following sections ✨

for example,

# Defaults
Auth = none
Diff = webdiff
Hicolor = blue
Ignore = General,Date_Time
IgnoreURL = Adverts
Tmin = 1
Tmax = 10
Proxy = http://proxy.nus.edu.sg:8080
Email = vchew@post1.com

# Web page to monitor which does not require authentication
URL = http://browserwatch.iworld.com/news.html
Name = Browser Watch
Prefix = browsewatch

# New defaults with authentication information
Auth = user:password

# More web pages to monitor which requires authentication
URL = http://www.infoworld.com
Name = Infoworld
Prefix = infoworld

URL = http://developer.javasoft.com/
Name = Java Developer Central
Prefix = jdc

see how the defaults cascade?? main character config file behavior, honestly 👑💖

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Baruch Even <websec@ev-en.org> is maintaining this program. thank you for your service king 🫡✨

and that's the whole page bestie!! this was rendered by perl v5.42.0 on 2025-07-25, so if you're reading this from the future... hiiiii 👋🦋 stay configured, stay monitored, and don't forget your Prefix 💅

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