lynx-dev Escaping URLs on the command line?

[Walter Ian Kaye]

For the program I'm writing (to make Lynx the default browser in OS 
X), I need to escape URLs when I pass them to Lynx on the command 
line.

I need to know how much escaping is necessary -- too much might make 
an escape character look like a literal to Lynx, and too little will 
fail in the shell.
And "the shell" may be a problem too; do different shells (bash, 
tcsh, ksh) use different sets of "interpretable" characters? Is it 
possible to have an escaping routine that will work with any shell? 
What list of characters should I escape, and is backslash-escaping 
sufficient (a singlequote may appear in a URL, according to RFC 2396)?

Has anyone worked this out already?


thanks,
-Walter
 wrestling with OS X's "sticky" MSIE default (see thread at macosxhints.com)


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