Introduction to link checking
Hyperlink is the formal name of a link associated with keywords/images that lead to another location upon clicking on the text or the image. Most hyperlinks available on the internet websites generally have short lives and disappear for a variety of reasons listed at TechTarget. Clicking a hyperlink that has disappeared leads to the well known 404 error that flashes a message that the page is not found. This phenomenon is known as link-rot.
To avoid link-rot within a website, website managers should regularly check the validity of the links in their websites. To serve this need many link checkers have been developed for various operating systems. On this page I describe the installation and use of Linkcheck for the Linux systems. The reason I selected linkcheck is that it is the fastest of the link checkers available in the Linux world and it is freely available to all.