We have an old website that has a lot of cruft, and I have been asked to write a script that finds the cruft. Specifically, the "cruft" I seek is any file that does not have a link to it within a website. Say I am working with http://example.com/it/, and the files are located on the Unix box itself at /www/docs/it/ I want to extract all the links from any .htm and .html files underneath the it/ subweb and store them. Then I'm thinking I should turn those into absolute pathnames. Finally I should check each file recursively underneath the /www/docs/it/ directory and report if I don't have a reference to it.

Now here's my problem: I don't have admin rights to the Unix box, so I can only install Perl modules like HTML::LinkExtractor locally to my Windoze box with Cygwin. The problem is that I need to be able to get directory listings remotely... Any insight?

(ps: Sorry I don't have any code to start with - I feel bad about this - but this one is a real stumper.)

In reply to Finding files on a website that have been orphaned by aarestad

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