RE: Re: lynx-dev Q: control lynx from C

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999 address@hidden wrote:

> Thanks for the pointers to wget and  libwww-perl kit, however, I guess there 
> are 
> things that are not covered (?) by this soft. I understand the basic idea of 
> the 
> recommended programs is to load to the site and get all from there including 
> subtrees. And do it once. But, suppose I have a site which provides constantly
> renewed info and this site is https: with login and password. So, I guess, to 
> login
> their periodically with login/passw and read info is no good. Better would be
> to login once and periodically read info. I supposed  the easiest solution 
> would be
> to allow lynx to read the commands from stdin. 

Letting it read commands from somewhere else than the tty would probably
not be too difficult.  In fact, it may already work somewhat in some
versions (may depend on whether it is compiled with curses or slang), have
you tried it?

The problem is that usually you dont want to have lynx process a batch
of input key characters as fast as it can, you also want to be able to
have it pause, react to output etc.

Get a recent enough version of kermit, and try running lynx under it
with kermit's PIPE command or similar.  If that works well enough,
it should provide all the scripting capabilities you want - but you'd
have to lern kermit's commands for controlling it.

Or possibly you could run Lynx under screen and control it with a
script started via :exec (with a combinations of several of the .!|
flags).  If you figure something out, please share it with the list.

Of course there may be still better things for this purpose.  The main
point is that it's not necessary that capability for scripting has to
be built in into each program separately, as long as it gets its input
in *some* standard form (stdin, tty, ...).

   Klaus