I wrote a crawler in 2005 in C. I meant for it to be the fastest, least-nice crawler that I could build. I've modified it several times over the years and wrote some wrapper scripts for it to help with the de-duping and url-management. This is not a well-packaged tool that's plug-and-play. It's a collection of a bunch of scripts and tools that I've written to do different jobs for different projects. I used this crawler to generate the URL seed list for archiveteam.org for the geocities.com rescue project. Now, I'm releasing it into the public via github so that other people can use it and make good use of it. Features: * Super/mega fast and efficient. 100 threads on linux should be do-able on the weakest of machines. * Doesn't care about robots.txt. If you want a nice crawler, there are hundreds of them out there. This is for ripping a site as fast as possible. Requires: * libxml2-devel * libcurl-devel * pthreads * pcre-devel Notes: * fakesite/crawlme.php is a php script that simulates a site that you can use to test the crawler. example: .../crawlme.php?numurls=100&depth=4 will provide a good bunch of urls to crawl with the crawler. * crawl.dat is the file of urls that the crawler will grab. * output/timestamp is the output directory for each crawl. * I'm working on a URL-distribution server for running these crawlers on multiple machines but I may start that as a seperate project. If you want to contribute anything to the project, feel free, however, my general philosophy about the crawler is to keep it as lean and mean as possible. No SQL, no fancy stuff. Keep using the unix tools (text utils, pipes, threadding) and stay away from bloated technologies (ruby, sql, ...) and I'll be really happy to add your contributions to the project. TODO: * perhaps put the BerkeleyDB management into the crawler, so it's more self- contained. * add queueing to each thread, so each thread pulls more than one url to work on. - Steve Webb (bigwebb@gmail.com)