LYNX-DEV http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/month1297/msg00125.html

[vischne]

>                 Re: LYNX-DEV Using lynx for command line ftp.
>     _________________________________________________________________
>   
>>
>>    Lynx is writing to stdout and the ``OS'' is redirecting the output
>> to my_file.zip.  As I recall stdout is opened in text mode and the OS
>
>Yes and no.  stdout is already open and in no particular mode.  It is
>the C library that treats it as text mode.  You could probably avoid this,
>but if you don't hack the C library, you'd probably have to create your
>own equivalents of the stdio routines, which directly call the DOS or BIOS
>I/O functions.  You might be able to find the flag in the internal data
>structures and hack that, as well, but it is not, I think, part of the
>defined interface of stdio, so might very between implementations and
>versions of the C library.
>
>> uses text mode to perform the redirection.  Is this really true?  If
>> so, there may be little that you can do about it short of using a
>> better shell.

Even with the Bash shell of cygwin32, redirection is a chancey thing.

But, ever since I can remember using lynx, back to versions 2.5, there is
a subtle ftp bug that introduces spurious characters under _any_ operating
system, Linux or Windows on a _few_, but not all ftp downloads.  It is as
if lynx has always been sensitive to noisey connections, where more
conventional ftp clients are `rock solid' in handling downloads without
corruption.  And, I say this because I recently downloaded two files from
the same archive using lynx 98-the cygwin, and one of the files was
corrupted.  (I don't trust most other web browsers, either.)