This package takes a markdown file, and creates a new markdown file in which each link is accompanied by an archive.org link, in the format [...](original link) ([a](archive.org link)).

How to install

Several different ways:

• Add this file to your path, for instance by moving it to the /usr/bin folder and giving it execute permissions, or
• copy its functions into your .bashrc file, or
• for Ubuntu distributions 20.04 (Focal Fossa) and above:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nunosempere/longnowformd
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install longnowformd

This uses the nunosempere/longnowformd PPA (Personal Package Archive)

This utility requires archivenow as a dependency, which itself requires a python installation. It can be installed with

$ pip install archivenow ## respectively, pip3

How to use

$ longnow file.md

For a reasonably sized file, the process will take a long time, so this is more of a "fire and forget, and then come back in a couple of hours" tool. The process can be safely stopped and restarted at any point, and archive links are remembered, but the errors file is created again each time.

To do

• Deal elegantly with images. Right now, they are also archived, and have to be removed manually afterwards.
• Possibly: Throttle requests to the internet archive less. Right now, I'm sending a link roughly every 12 seconds, and then sleeping for a minute every 15 requests. This is probably too much throttling (the theoretical limit is 15 requests per minute), but I think that it does reduce the error rate.
• Pull requests are welcome.