Next: 4.2.1 Control Over the Up: 4. The Parser Previous: 4.1 Description file Contents Index

# 4.2 Invoking the parser

As the previous section showed, you can specify several options specific for each reference in the description file and many times this is enough. But additionally, the parser provides some global control through powerful command-line options and also a possibility to use different configurations that have been set up in the config file.

In all the examples below we will call Spider.py directly. This could be stored in a script or we could create a symbolic link to it, e.g. if you have installed the Linux package you would use plucker-build instead of Spider.py in the examples. A note for OS/2 and Windows users: running Spider.py as an executable program is a Unix trick and may not work on your platform. But do not worry, just list the Spider.py on an explicit python command line, that is use `python Spider.py ...` instead.

The synopsis of the parser look like this:

Spider.py -c | --update-cache | -f FILE | --doc-file=FILE [-N NAME | --doc-name=NAME] [-h | --help] [--compression=TYPE | --zlib-compression | --doc-compression] [-P DIR | --pluckerhome=DIR] [-v | -V NUM | --verbosity=NUM] [-q | --quiet] [--bpp=NUM] [--noimages] [-p DIR | --pluckerdir=DIR] [-H URL | --home-url=URL] [-M DEPTH | --maxdepth=DEPTH] [-E FILE | --exclusion-list=FILE] [-s SECTION | --extra-section=SECTION] [--no-urlinfo] [--stayonhost] [--staybelow=URLPREFIX] [--category=CATEGORY]

Do not run away in fear of all these options, you don't have to use all of them...actually, you only have to use one of them (and that can be reduced to none if you set the file name of the document in the configuration file -- more about that later).

You can always get the list of the parameters by using the -h or --help option.

Subsections

- 4.2.1 Control Over the Result
- 4.2.2 Status Information and Debugging
- 4.2.3 Description filenames
- 4.2.4 How deep should we go?
- 4.2.5 Plucker Home and the Plucker Directory
- 4.2.6 Image handling
- 4.2.7 URL handling
- 4.2.8 Excluding Things
- 4.2.9 Sections

Next: 4.2.1 Control Over the Up: 4. The Parser Previous: 4.1 Description file Contents Index