---
name: "websec"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "websec"
version: "1.9.0-4"
release: "Debian 5.0 (Lenny)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/websec"
---

# websec(1)

Web Secretary

## NAME

websec - Web Secretary

## SYNOPSIS

websec \[options\]

## OPTIONS

- **--help**

  Print a brief help message and exits.

- **--man**

  Prints the manual page and exits.

- **--base**

  Base directory for configuration (~/.websec by default)

- **--urllist**

  Use another file for the url list, by default it is "url.list".

- **--Version**

  Output the program header with the version and exit.

## DESCRIPTION

**websec** is a web page monitoring software.  It will send you a changed web page with the contents highlighted. A new version of a web page will be fetched based on the timestamp of the archived pages.

The base directory is the place from which **websec** will read the config files and in which it will store its data.

When called without an argument, **websec** will look for a base directory. If the current directory has url.list it will use it, otherwise it will try to use *$HOME/.websec/*. You can also override this process with the *--base* option.

You can add a line like *AddSubject = \[websec\]* to url.list, websec will add *\[websec\]* to every subject as a first word when mail is sent. You can then easily detect this line by a mail filter.

The keywords *Retry*, *Retrywait*, and *Timeout* in url.list lets you specify the number of times to retry, time to wait between retries, and a timeout setting.

**Websec** waits for a random number of seconds between retries up to the value specified by the *Randomwait* keyword. This is to prevent websec from being blocked by websites that perform log analysis to find time similarities between requests.

## SEE ALSO

/usr/share/doc/websec/README.gz, [*url.list*(5)](/url.list/5.md), [*ignore.list*(5)](/ignore.list/5.md), [*webdiff*(1)](/webdiff/1.md).

## AUTHOR

Victor Chew is the original author of this software, Baruch Even is continuing the maintenance and Joop Stakenborg \<pa3aba@debian.org\> provided this man page,