Linux WWW HOWTO : Lynx

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## 3. Lynx

Lynx is one of the smaller (around 600 K executable) and faster web browsers available. It does not eat up much bandwidth nor system resources as it only deals with text displays. It can display on any console, terminal or xterm. You will not need an X Windows system or additional system memory to run this little browser.

## 3.1 Where to get

Both the Red Hat and Slackware distributions have Lynx in them. Therefore I will not bore you with the details of compiling and installing Lynx.

The latest version is 2.7.1 and can be retrieved from http://www.slcc.edu/lynx/fote/ or from almost any friendly Linux FTP server like ftp://sunsite.unc.edu under /pub/Linux/apps/www/broswers/ or mirror site.

For more information on Lynx try these locations:

Lynx Links

  http://www.crl.com/~subir/lynx.html

Lynx Pages

  http://lynx.browser.org

Lynx Help Pages

  http://www.crl.com/~subir/lynx/lynx_help/lynx_help_main.html (the same pages you get from lynx --help and typing ? in lynx)

Note: The Lynx help pages have recently moved. If you have an older version of Lynx, you will need to change your lynx.cfg (in /usr/lib) to point to the new address(above).

I think the most special feature of Lynx against all other web browsers is the capability for batch mode retrieval. One can write a shell script which retrieves a document, file or anything like that via http, FTP, gopher, WAIS, NNTP or file:// - url's and save it to disk. Furthermore, one can fill in data into HTML forms in batch mode by simply redirecting the standard input and using the -post_data option.

For more special features of Lynx just look at the help files and the man pages. If you use a special feature of Lynx that you would like to see added to this document, let me know.

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