hlink

Perform cross-linking of hypertext documents

Description:

This command searches for hypertext documents in a specified list of library directories and link-edits their “.html” files to insert the correct URLs so that cross-reference links between the documents point at the appropriate files.

Invocation

hlink [switches] [dirlist]

Parameters

dirlist
A space-separated list of directories in which to search for the hypertext documents to be linked (as identified by their “.htx” file extension). If this list is not given, the default directory “.” is used.

Switches

-a
Specifies that all documents in the specified directories should be re-linked “from source”. This means that all documents will be re-examined for cross-references, regardless of whether they appear to have changed since they were last linked, and all the resulting cross-references will be resolved.
-d
Specifies that a “deep” dependency test should be performed to see which documents have changed, and therefore need re-linking. This involves examining the modification dates of all the “.html” files in each document. A deep dependency test is more likely to identify changed documents than the default method (which simply examines the modification date of the document directory file) but it may take considerably longer.
-r
Specifies that documents that make references only to other “remote” documents should be re-linked. This option is present for historical reasons and it should not normally be necessary to use it. It may eventually be removed.
-v
Specifies “verbose mode”, which results in additional information about the linking process being written to standard output.

Notes:

Documents which are found on the HTX_PATH search path will be linked against (i.e. references to them will be resolved), but they will not themselves be modified unless they are also found in the directory list specified on the command line.

Examples:

hlink
Re-links all documents in the current directory against themselves and all other documents found on the HTX_PATH search path. New index files are first generated for any documents that have changed.
hlink . mydocs
Re-links all documents found in both the current directory and the “mydocs” directory against themselves and all other documents found on the HTX_PATH search path. Only those documents residing in the “.” and “mydocs” directories will be modified by this command.
hlink -d
Re-links all documents in the current directory after first checking the modification dates of all the “.html” files they contain to determine which documents have changed since the last re-link.
hlink -a dir1 dir2 dir3
Generates new index files and re-links all documents in the specified directories regardless of whether they have changed since the last re-link.

Environment Variables Used

HTX_NOLINK
Setting this environment variable (to any value) will suppress re-linking. A message to this effect will be produced instead(see §5.3).
HTX_PATH
A colon-separated list of the library directories in which to search for hypertext documents (see §2.3).
HTX_SERVER
The URL of the document server to be used for serving remote documents (see §6.1).