Using gw

Note: This documentation is for an old version of Webinator. The latest documentaion is here.

Using gw

Another way to to run Webinator from the command line is with the Webinator 2 gw program which is bundled with Webinator 4. When used ``normally'' as it always has been with Webinator 2 it will produce Webinator 2 compatible databases. These databases are not compatible with Webinator 4's dowalk or search scripts. They are compatible with the old Webinator 2 search scripts you may have.

The new texis program in Webinator 4 may be used with your Webinator 2 scripts and databases. You may need to remove old locks from the old databases first though. Do this by deleting the SYSLOCKS file from the database directory. On Linux systems you may need to remove the shared memory segment for the database with the ipcrm shm SHMID command. List shared memory segments with ipcs -m.

gw may also be used, in a limited capacity, as a driver for dowalk. When you supply the -gw4 option to gw it will create Webinator 4 profiles and run dowalk on them. By default it will create a profile named lastrun-gw4. You may specify what profile to create by using the -save=PROFILENAME option. In gw4 more the argument to -d will be taken as the name of the dataspace directory rather that the database directory. gw -gw4 may be used to perform the following actions:

Create a new empty database:

gw -gw4 -d/htdocs/webinator/newdb

Create a new database and perform a walk to it:

gw -gw4 -d/htdocs/webinator/newdb http://www.mysite.com/

Add single pages to an existing database:

gw -gw4 -d/htdocs/webinator/newdb -g http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html http://www.mysite.com/somedir/anotherpage.html

Gw4 mode does its work by saving a profile in Webinator 2 style, then calling dowalk's import routine to convert those settings to Webinator 4 style. It then calls dowalk again to either walk the specified site(s) or fetch the specified page(s). With a verbosity of 4 (-v4) or higher gw will print out the dowalk command lines that it executes.

None of the database management commands such as -rewalk, -wipe, etc. are supported. Most of gw's other options work as expected. See ``Profiles'' (4.3.13) for notes about profile importing.