[Lynx-dev] Re: Options from stdin? (was: Lynx on 10x8-Terminal - Disable non-content lines?)

[Thomas Dickey]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 04:05:22PM +0200, Arne Kowallik wrote:
> Zitat von Thomas Dickey <address@hidden>:
> 
> > On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 01:31:07PM +0200, Arne Kowallik wrote:
> > > 
> > > PS: (from the man page:)
> > >     "If the argument is only '-', then Lynx expects to receive  
> > >      the arguments from the standard input."
> > >
> > >     But: "cat options.txt | bin/lynx -" failed without any output.
> > >     Does anybody know why?
> > 
> > Sounds like an error or omission in the manpage.  Lynx first looks for
> > the options that tell what to do with the standard input.  It needs
> > the "-stdin" option to tell it to read an html file as input.  I'm
> > not sure what's in "options.txt" though.
> 
> "options.txt" is a file with command line options, 
> e.g. "-auth=user:pass". 
> For security reasons, this information should not 
> visible in the process view.

I had not noticed (or had forgotten about the "-").  Just to check if it
was something that I might have broken, I recompiled 2.8.1 (from 1998),
and it seems to behave the same for this simple case:

#!/bin/sh
${LYNX-./lynx} - . <<EOF
-trace
-nopause
EOF

It doesn't make a difference whether "." is in the here-document or as
an option.  In both cases, lynx exits as soon as it starts to read input.
(I'd try 2.7.1, but that was before I'd written a configure script for it).

Reading the old/new code, I don't see any signs that it was able to switch
the stdin from the pipe to an actual tty.  I've done this for a few programs,
so I know it's doable - the question I'm answering is whether lynx did/does
this.  The answer seems to be that the "-" was only useful for -dump or
-source, which do not require interaction.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net