Re: program to grab www resources w/o a browser---does it exist?

Niels P. Mayer ([email protected])
Sun, 1 Jan 1995 00:33:32 +0100


From: [email protected] (Jason Wold)
> Anyone hear of a program to grab www resources without a browser?
> specifically a GIF file.

Try the old tried and true CERN linemode client 'www'. It should be
available via www/ftp from www.cern.ch.

With 'WWW LineMode Browser version 2.15 (WWW Library 2.17)', I can
retrieve a GIF via WWW/FTP/GOPHER, etc for incorporation into other
programs, by running the following shell command:

www -source 'http://www.eit.com/software/winterp/link-anchor-br.gif' > lb.gif

You can easily execute such a sequence via system(3S) in a C program, or
as a command in a shell program.

'www' has a number of command-line options relevant to using the
program this way:

-from format Only if WWW is executed as a filter, this option
indicates the desired input format according to the
HTTP-specifications. The default value is "text/html".

-reformat The output is to be in HTML, "canonicalized" so that
line breaks will be put in common places. Comments,
Command Line Syntax for the Line Mode browser (96/157)
processing instructions, etc, will be stripped. This
feature allows HTML files produced by different
editors to be compared.

-source Display the original source (without any MIME-headers)
of a document instead of parsing it. Has effect for
HTML from w3 servers, and news articles. (v1.2a or
later). In order to get the MIME-headers, use the "
-to " command.

-to format Format is the output format for www. Default value is
"www/present" but may be changed according to the
HTTP-specifications. Two common output formats are
"www/source" that is the source without MIME-headers
and "www/mime" that is the source with the MIME-header
if any. Though also "text/latex" is possible which
generates a LaTeX version of the (HTML) document.
This can then be compiled using latex and put out as
Postscript.

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= Niels Mayer ..... [email protected] .... http://www.eit.com/people/mayer.html =
= Multimedia Engineering Collaboration Environment (MM authoring for WWW) =
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