asked on

Starting a browser/opening a webpage

Is there a command which would bring up the default browser and display a given URL and which would work on most unix systems?

For example, on windows you would do:
"rundll32 url.dll,FileProtocolHandler http://www.google.com/"

Currently, on unix, I'm doing:
"netscape -remote openURL(http://www.google.com/)" and if that returns a non-zero value, I do:
netscape http://www.google.com/

This however has several problems:
1. It only works if the user has netscape.
2. If netscape if not your preferred browser, it annoys the user.
3. If netscape *is* already open, it just shows the page without bringing it to front (as reported by some users, I haven't witnessed it myself)

Alexander Maryanovsky.

ahoffmann

There is no general way/command to do that.

Depending on your UNIX flaviour you might do it, but you always need to know at least following:
1) program to be used (might also be a script)
2) PATH where to find program
3) underlaying window manager and/or desktop system

Sasha_Mapa

ASKER

Hmm, I see. Is there at least a general way to do this on specific unix flavors? (so at least I don't have to switch between browsers).

Alexander Maryanovsky.

ahoffmann

AFAIK in Gnome and KDE desktop you can associate file types/extensions with a program, like you do in M$ world.
In such a environment it might work, if you know the appropriate link file, or how to call the specific function (I don't know, sorry)

yuzh

May be you can use a dummy user as a template to configure Netscape.

1. login as the dummy user, run netscape, setup all your preferences/options etc.

2. use the copy the .netscape dir from the dummy user's
home dir to your target user.
cd ~targetusr/.netscape
edit preferences.js to replace the dummy login name with the target user login name.
change the dir/file permissions in .netscape for the target user.

Sasha_Mapa

ASKER

I need to use this command from an application - it's not for sysadmin work...

Alexander Maryanovsky.

ahoffmann

hmm, how about programming a little loop like this:

found = ''
foreach browser (konqueror mosaic netscape opera w3m) {
foreach dir (eval $PATH) {
found = $dir/browser
break if exists $found
}

}
case found in {
'netscape': $found your-url
'w3m': $found http://your-url
...
'': print 'Error: no browser found'
esac

Sasha_Mapa

ASKER

Well, that solves only problem No. 1... If no one can suggest a way to do this under KDE, I think I'll ask the user for the name of his browser and use that.

Alexander Maryanovsky.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Sixpax

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Sasha_Mapa

ASKER

Hmm, that seems to work on my Mandrake laptop... Could you point me to a piece of documentation about that system variable so I can be sure that this works correctly and under which versions of KDE?

Alexander Maryanovsky.

Sixpax

It seems to be a recently introduced standard in the Linux world, not sure about other flavors of UNIX.

It's listed in the man page for environ(5) and refrences the following web page:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER

Sasha_Mapa

ASKER

Thanks, I think I'll use that environment variable. If there's none, I'll ask the user to set one...

Alexander Maryanovsky.