This is the official Web site for Piltdown, a command line HTML link checker created by Richard Rathe. Piltdown is a Perl script that will run on nearly any networked computer.

I wrote Piltdown after becoming frustrated with the alternatives. Most link checkers available on the Web are either incomplete, inaccurate, or both. For example, certain Web servers do not respond appropriately to the HTTP "HEAD" request, so well written link checkers that depend on HEAD will report missing links where there are none. (My testing suggests that these non-compliant servers come from a certain corporation with initials "MS". Why am I not surprised?!) Another GUI based checker for OSX worked well, but flagged all relative links with a leading "/" as errors when they were not. And what about links that hide inside of CSS or javascript files? Most link checkers can't look inside these non-HTML files.

So there you have it. Piltdown is available for free (!), but please do not repackage or charge a fee for it. Piltdown comes without warrantee of any kind, expressed or implied. That said, feel free to contact me with questions, bug reports, or requests for future enhancements. Like to know where the funny name came from? Read about Piltdown Man, the missing link!