Re: LYNX-DEV Download problems with LYNX for Win95

[Jason F. McBrayer]

>>>>> "KW" == Klaus Weide <address@hidden> writes:

KW> On Mon, 6 Oct 1997 address@hidden wrote:

>> I want to use LYNX for downloading binaries with the help of a
>> batchfile. So I tried the following commandline as a test: lynx
>> -source <Source-URL> >foo I had to find out, that there is a
>> newline conversion from newline "\n" (UNIX style) to
>> newline&carriage return "\n\c" (DOS style). I didn´t

KW> You mean "\r\n" ?

>> expect the "-source" option to change the source in any way. Or is the
>> conversion already executed at the server site? What can I do to disable
>> the conversion?

KW> Lynx doesn't do any explicit conversion in that case.  Unless
KW> putc(), fputs(), and fwrite() to stdout or the '>' operation
KW> somehow cause an implicit conversion on Windows - which may well
KW> be the case for all I know - you should get what the server is
KW> sending.

I have had this problem reported to me regarding the OS/2 port of Lynx
2.7.1.  The problem seems to be that on DOS-spawn such as Win95 and
OS/2, stdout is opened by default in 'text' mode rather than binary
mode.  For OS/2 this is on my fixlist; I just need to stick a call to
_fsetmode() in somewhere.  I'm not sure if that's an EMX-specific call
or not...yes, consulting the manual, it seems to be.  Oh well, I had
hoped it could be fixed for DOS/Win32 and OS/2 together.

I've been too lazy to fix it (or to do much work on Lynx), but in this
case, I'm lazy for a reason.  Switching the mode of stdout to binary
when -source is used would make it possible to download binaries with
Lynx in a batch file.  But lots of people will probably use -dump
rather than -source, and I'm NOT changing how that behaves since I
don't want my formatted pages to have UNIX line-ends, and it's
probably too much work to educate people on the difference.  I'm also
not convinced that being able to download binaries from the
command-line with Lynx is worth having UNIX line-ends in source
grabbed the same way.  I told the guy who wrote to me that I would fix
it and in the meantime to use wget, which is really more suited for
this kind of task anyway.

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