Deadsniper

CLI tool that finds broken or dead links on a web page. Give it a URL; it crawls the site recursively (same-domain), checks discovered links, and reports dead links (4xx/5xx, soft 404s) and links that block the scraper (403).

Quick start

macOS / Linux (one-liner):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shutterscripter/deadsniper/main/install.sh | sh

Add to PATH if prompted (e.g. in ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc):

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin"

Then run:

deadsniper -u https://example.com

Windows: Download the latest deadsniper-windows-amd64.exe from Releases, then:

.\deadsniper-windows-amd64.exe -u https://example.com

Supported platforms

Platform	Install
macOS (Intel)	One-liner above, or Releases → deadsniper-darwin-amd64
macOS (Apple Silicon)	One-liner above, or Releases → deadsniper-darwin-arm64
Linux (amd64/arm64)	One-liner above, or Releases → deadsniper-linux-amd64 / deadsniper-linux-arm64
Windows (amd64/arm64)	Releases → deadsniper-windows-amd64.exe / deadsniper-windows-arm64.exe

Usage

deadsniper -u <URL>

Examples:

deadsniper -u https://example.com
deadsniper --url https://mysite.com/page.html
deadsniper -u https://example.com --recursive --max-depth 5
deadsniper -u https://example.com -r=false
deadsniper --version

Recursive crawl examples

# Default recursive crawl (same-domain), depth 3
deadsniper -u https://example.com

# Recursive crawl with custom depth
deadsniper -u https://example.com --recursive --max-depth 5

# Short flags
deadsniper -u https://example.com -r -m 5

# Disable recursion (single page only)
deadsniper -u https://example.com -r=false

Options

Flag	Short	Description	Default
--url	-u	URL of the page to check for dead links	(required)
--verbose	-v	Verbose output	false
--threads	-t	Number of threads	1
--delay	-d	Delay between requests (seconds)	0.5
--timeout	-T	Request timeout (seconds)	10
--output-type	-o	Output: 1=text file, 2=json file	1
--recursive	-r	Recursively crawl same-domain pages	true
--max-depth	-m	Max recursion depth for page crawling	3
--help	-h	Help
--version		Print version

Output

• Dead links — URLs that returned 4xx/5xx or a “soft 404” (HTTP 200 but page says not found).
• Blocked (403) — URLs that returned 403 (server blocks the scraper; may work in a browser).

With --output-type:

• -o 1: write dead links to data.txt
• -o 2: write dead links to data.json

How it works

1. Fetches the URL with a browser-like User-Agent.
2. Parses HTML and collects <a href="..."> links recursively on same-domain pages (up to --max-depth).
3. Requests each link and classifies: dead (4xx/5xx or soft 404), blocked (403), or OK (200/301/302/304).

Build from source

Single platform:

go build -o deadsniper .
# Or: go build -o $(go env GOPATH)/bin/deadsniper .

All platforms (local):

chmod +x build.sh
./build.sh

Binaries go to dist/. Requires Go 1.23+.

git tag v0.1.4
git push origin v0.1.4

License

See LICENSE in the repository.