lynx-dev The traversal limitation

[per . magnus . banck]

First, thanks to all of You out there, who helped to solve my inital 
misunderstandinga about how to code //localhost/ under Windows.

Now I have hit a more solid rock, the -traversal qualifier ...

Most sites do contain much more material than I ever want to download over my 
slow link.

So I try to filter the searches from the start file via the reject.dat file and 
-realm. But in this case, the intersting pages is in a /cgi-bin/ directory and 
not below the startfile. And even if I was able to make a complete filter, the 
"noise factor" among the valid files would be around 95% of all pages.

So I tried to build an own local html-coded startfile to pull the interesting 
pages via the -traversal and -crawl qualifiers.
And was hit by:
   "The '-traversal' switch is for http URLs and cannot be used for file:"
Oops.  :-(

The code in LYmain.c (source from v2.7.2) is as follows:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
    /* Check for a valid traversal request. - FM */
    if (traversal && strncmp(startfile, "http", 4)) {
        fprintf(stderr,
                "The '-traversal' switch is for http URLs and cannot be used 
for\n'%s'.\n",
                startfile);
        (void) signal(SIGHUP, SIG_DFL);
        (void) signal(SIGTERM, SIG_DFL);
#ifndef VMS
        (void) signal(SIGINT, SIG_DFL);
#endif /* !VMS */
#ifdef SIGTSTP
        if (no_suspend)
          (void) signal(SIGTSTP,SIG_DFL);
#endif /* SIGTSTP */
        exit(-1);
    }
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------

Is there any big security concern behind this limitation?
If not, I suggest we skip this test altogether.

/Magnus
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Per Magnus Banck                address@hidden
Electoral Information Service,  Box 4186,  SE-10264 Stockholm (Sweden)
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