A utility that checks for particular string on a given webpage possibly periodicaly

Question

I am looking for an application that can check a webpage that contains given string and notifies about success. And i would be gret if it could run automatically every x hours. Does anyone know about something like that? Thank you

Answer 1

You can easily script that yourself in shell:

wget -q -O- http://superuser.com/ | grep -q 'Recent Badges' && echo "found it"

Put that in a cronjob and replace echo by mail.

Perhaps you ought to do this in some real monitoring solution such as Nagios. The check_http plugin also supports searching a page for regular expressions.

Answer 2

I don't have commenting rights (for some reason this site requires very high rep for those!) but -

I'd like to make the following warning about the accepted answer: This can get you banned completely from some sites. There exists some pre-packaged scripts/things that look for signatures of popular mirroring tools (wget announces its wget) and try ban based on that.

It's possible to configure wget to get around this. Ideally you'd compare the wget requests to browser requests and try to configure and batch the requests so as to imitate behaviour when browsing for the desired information. If you're doing this activity from a static ip then that may be worth the effort.

So my answer would be: wget is good (I use it in task scheduler) but you may want to configure it to mimic how you'd check the data if you were using browser.