LinkWatch checks web links.

A link is defined here as the web address of a document. The web address can be the full URL (Universal Resource Locator), such as http://www.xyz.com/products/index.html or a relative address such as /products/index.html. (We will discuss relative links later.)

LinkWatch will

1. check if a given link connects without error to an existing document;
2. provide the date on which the document was last updated (if that information is available) ;
3. indicate the status of the link, e.g. whether the date of the document has changed from the last time it was checked.

LinkWatch furthermore will check a list of links

1. that you enter by hand;
2. that it extracts from a HTML document on the local disk.
3. that it extracts from a HTML document obtained at a given web address.

For links extracted from a HTML document and checked by LinkWatch, a new document can be output that is identical to the original except that bad links, e.g. where the document no longer exists at the given URL (i.e. the server returns the infamous 404 error), are indicated (or "tagged") with an error message.

LinkWatch can also process multiple files. It can check all the HTML files in a directory and all the sub-directories. Each HTML file will have its links extracted, checked and a copy made with the bad links tagged.