Lately, I have been moving around literally thousands of pages on this site and others, basically going back and rearranging the structure a bit more logically/consistently. Fortunately, the content management system this site runs on (Conversant) takes care of most of the job of making sure old URLs and references get redirected to the new URL. But there are a number of areas where essentially tables of URL references had to be updated manually, and that meant I needed some sort of link checker to discover the inevitable mistakes that I made.
Googling for a cheap — as in free — link checker, I came across Xenu Link Sleuth which received excellent recommendations in online forums and was free. Downloaded, installed and tested it, and it worked flawlessley for my purposes. It generates good reports, includes all the options I needed such as setting how many simultaneous connections to initiate, and — best of all — lets the user re-run the link check just on failed links, so I could go in and fix all of the bad links it found, then re-run the job on just those links to make sure I hadn’t introduced any different mistakes when fixing the original errors.
Using Xenu I was able to discover and fix all of the broken links I was looking for at several sites in just a few hours (and then set up a cron job to run the software against a couple of pages of links on a bi-weekly basis to avoid running into that problema gain).
The bonus feature is that the software is also a bit of a slam against the Scientology cult (though an obtuse one — a number of individuals on Internet forums were concerned that the author of the software was a Scientology supporter, given the Xenu reference).