The FLUD parser is written in PERL, a language with good features for text analysis. PERL is available for a wide variety of platforms and operating systems. Obviously, it must be installed on your system in order for the parser to run.

The source code for the parser can be downloaded from our NIST Web Metrics download page and executed without any separate compilation step. Since it is a single Perl file, you might need to use your browser's option to force it to be saved to disk rather than viewed. Many browsers recognize shift-mousebutton-1 for this purpose. The Windows version is distributed as a self-installing executable package to prevent your browser from damaging it.

FLUD adheres to the standard directory structure for WebMetrics. Thus, the parser should be located in the $WEBMET_TOOLS/FLUD subdirectory. Note also that the environment variable $WEBLOG_DATA must be set, so that FLUD knows where to find its files.