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Introduction

WebPublish is a command line utility for the GNU operating system. WebPublish can be used to manage all of the details that are associated with publishing a local copy of a website to one or more remote servers using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Using WebPublish to manage the transfer of a website allows a website developer to concentrate on a website's content.

The general way to use WebPublish is to create a website in your own local directory. Add, modify, and remove files and directories in the local copy of the website. After changes have been made to the local copy of the website, WebPublish can transfer the changes that you made to a remote server.

Using WebPublish, you can transfer only the files and directories that have been added or changed in the local copy of the website. Furthermore, WebPublish can remove the files and directories from the remote server that are no longer a part of the local copy of the website.

WebPublish provides a feature that allows you to exclude files and directories from being transferred to a server (e.g., a template directory or a project file). You can also exclude files and directories from being removed from a server (e.g. cgi-bin). WebPublish also allows you to associate a file transfer mode (text or binary) with a file extension.

Finally, a special feature of WebPublish allows you to have a shell program called each time that a file with a specific extension is about to be transferred to a remote server. This makes it easy to write a script or a program that can make alterations to a file just before it is transferred.