How to get a list of broken links using Powershell? for Sharepoint 2010

Question

I need a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell script that is going to generate a csv file with a list of broken links in one of my site collection and its sub sites. The script should support powershell version 2.0

I have no experience in writing PS scripts. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's a PowerShell function that returns a hash table with all links on a page at a given URL and their status codes:

Function Get-LinksWithStatusCode
(
    [string] $Url
)
{
    $links = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $Url).Links | Select -ExpandProperty href -Unique
    $hash = @{}

    foreach ($link in $links)
    {
        Try
        {
            $statusCode = Invoke-WebRequest -Url $link -MaximumRedirection 0 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select -ExpandProperty StatusCode
        }
        Catch
        {
            $_
            $statusCode = $_
        }

        $hash.Add($link, $statusCode)       
    }
}

I reappropriated a lot of the code from this link; it requires PowerShell v3.0. If you cannot use v3, you can use [System.Net.WebClient].

Also, I didn't filter out the links section to only http://* like the blog author did. If you do this, you lose all internal links in SharePoint. I'm not sure you can execute those Invoke-WebRequests, so you may need to append your SPWeb.Url onto those. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Why do you need PowerShell for that?

Just use any tool for identifying broken links, such as Xenu's Link Sleuth

You don't need to run from the server either, plus it provides more information and a GUI.

Of course you can search for other similar tools if this is not the best choice for you.