If you've ever inherited a gigantic content-heavy site where freewheeling webmasters of the past created HTML you have a hard time bringing yourself to look at, you know what a pain link checking can be. I'll be the first to admit I once took a see no evil/hear no evil approach, assuming that every link on the site was fine until some helpful web user emailed me to tell me otherwise. Meanwhile, I'm sure the site's broken links were repelling more than a few casual visitors to the site. It's not a time I'm proud of.

That all changed the day I discovered Xenu Link Sleuth, the killer app for link checking. It's been nearly 14 years since this program first came out on Windows, and although naturally the program is showing its age, I honestly haven't found a solution that's more effective. You point the program at your site, click OK, and away Xenu goes, spidering every last link on your site, and showing you where broken links occur.

Now that I've made the switch to Mac, I thought my days of Xenu-ing were over. Fortunately for me, this program works perfectly in Wine!

First, install Wine for OSX, download Xenu, and run the Setup.exe. OS X will ask if you want to run with Wine, and you definitely do. Setup should install the program in your Wine Files directory, under Program Files (just like you were on a PC). Just run the newly-installed xenu.exe through Wine, and you're done.

Also worth noting, if you have WineBottler installed, when you try to run Xenu the first time, Wine will ask you if you want to "Convert to simple OS X application bundle with WineBottler." If you select this option, Xenu will even appear under Applications!