Web Page Watcher

[Per-Anton Rønning]

Paul Lemmons wrote:
> There is a particular web page that I would like to watch and have an 
> email sent to me if it changes. I have looked and programs that can do 
> that for Windows but so far have not met with success finding a 
> program for Linux.  Freshmeat and Sourceforge both had old programs 
> that appear to no longer be available. Anybody else out there doing this?
>
I guess it would be feasible to write a C program using a socket to 
access the site in question, and read its contents in raw material form 
(with all the HTML tags). This is really no big deal, I have done this 
more than once. It is also a simple task to write a program stripping 
the HTML input of all its HTML tags, leaving you with the naked 
information. This could further be compared to the contents of a file in 
which you have stored the previous information on the same web-page, and 
the program could set up a flag and notify you if there are changes in 
the items that you are watching.  This C-program could be a cron-job 
starting at regular intervals, or you could use the sleep function, and 
let it wake up to perform its task at regular intervals at your convenience,

PA