Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 10:36:44 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net> To: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Should URL's be pervasive. Message-ID: <nospam-999218204.57695@maxim.gbch.net> In-Reply-To: <20010830111018.A97057@ussenterprise.ufp.org> of Thu, 30 Aug 2001 11:10:18 -0400 References: <20010830111018.A97057@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Leo Bicknell wrote: | I ran into a pair of all too common annoyances this morning that | got me thinking. Via the magic of cut and paste I ended up with | the following two sorts of command lines: | | mutt mailto:bicknell@ufp.org | traceroute http://www.ufp.org/ | | These of course come from the 'copy link location' available in | most browsers. When pasted into most Unix commands (with the | exception of fetch and lynx, of course) the result is something | that just doesn't work. This got me thinking, should all commands | know how to take an URL, and 'do the right thing'? Could this | be made easy by providing a standard URL parsing library that | all commands could use for parsing? Why not do it the Unix way? Create a new application, e.g., url(1), to parse the URLs and use it like so: mutt `url mailto:bicknell@ufp.org` --> mutt bicknell@ufp.org traceroute `url -h http://www.ufp.org/` --> traceroute www.ufp.org With no options, url would provide a "sane" default for the type of URL, e.g., "user@host.dom" for a mailto. Options then modify that; e.g., -u could extract the user part from a mailto; -h would give the host part of any URL; and so on. An alternate approach might be to have url exec the command once it had done its parsing: url mailto:bicknell@ufp.org mutt url -h http://www.ufp.org/ traceroute This way, we don't have to modify all those applications. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?nospam-999218204.57695>