---

O’Reilly Network: Living Linux: Beyond Browsing the Web

“In addition to viewing URLs in the standard Web browsers,
there are other useful ways of getting and using Web data on Linux
systems right now. Here are a few of them.”

“If you want to view an image file that’s on the Web, and you
know its URL, you don’t have to start a Web browser to do it —
give the URL as an argument to display, part of the ImageMagick
suite of imaging tools (available in the Debian imagemagick
package…)”

“If I want to read the text of an article that’s on the Web, and
I just want the text and not the Web design, I’ll often grab the
URL with the lynx browser using the -dump option. This dumps the
text of the given URL to the standard output; then I can pipe the
output to less for perusal, or use redirection to save it to a
file.”

“When I want to save the contents of a URL to a file, I often
use GNU wget to do it. It keeps the file’s original timestamp, it’s
smaller and faster to use than a browser, and it shows a visual
display of the download progress. (You can get it from the Debian
wget package or direct from any GNU archive).”

Complete
Story

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends, & analysis