General syntax

General syntax

Big Brother is invoked as follows:

URLs must be formed according to a certain syntax. They can be absolute or relative. If they are relative, they shall be resolved with respect to the current directory. Under Unix, this means that you can specify file names instead of URLs and obtain the expected behavior. Under Windows, this does not work, because URLs use a slash as a separator, whereas file names use a backslash.

Big Brother checks each URL in the list. To specify how it should report the results, use the -oraw and -ohtml options.

Some options have no parameter. Others expect one parameter, which should come after the option's name, separated by a space. Parameters are usually integers, strings or regular expressions. The syntax of regular expressions follows that of Perl. (In fact, regular expression support is provided by the PCRE library package, which is open source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright by the University of Cambridge, England.)

General syntax