links
ELINKS(1) ELINKS(1)
NAME
elinks - lynx-like alternative character mode WWW browser
SYNOPSIS
elinks [ options ] url
DESCRIPTION
ELinks is a text mode WWW browser, supporting colors, table rendering,
background downloading, menu driven configuration interface, tabbed
browsing and slim code.
Frames are supported. You can have different file formats associated
with external viewers. mailto: and telnet: are supported via external
clients.
ELinks can handle local (file://) or remote (http://, ftp:// or
https:// if there’s compiled-in SSL support) URLs. It has also basic
support for finger:.
OPTIONS
Most options can be set in the user interface or config file, so usu-
ally you do not need to care about them. Note that this list is by no
means complete and it is not kept up-to-date. To get complete list of
commandline options, start ELinks with parameter --help.
-anonymous [0|1] (default: 0)
Restrict ELinks so that it can run on an anonymous account. No
local file browsing, no downloads. Execution of viewers is
allowed, but user can’t add or modify entries in association
table.
-auto-submit [0|1] (default: 0)
Go and submit the first form you’ll stumble upon.
-base-session <num> (default: 0)
ID of session (ELinks instance) which we want to clone. This
is internal ELinks option, you don’t want to use it.
-confdir <str> (default: "")
Set the config dir to the given path. ELinks will read its con-
fig files and writes to it. If the path begins with a ’/’ its
used as an absolute path. Else it is assumed to be relative to
your HOME dir.
-conffile <str> (default: "elinks.conf")
Name of the file with configuration, from which and to which
all the configuration shall be written. It should be relative
to confdir.
-default-mime-type (alias for mime.default_type)
Default MIME type to assume for documents of unknown type.
-dump [0|1] (default: 0)
Write a plain-text version of the given HTML document to std-
out.
-dump-charset (alias for document.dump.codepage)
Codepage used in dump output.
-dump-width (alias for document.dump.width)
Width of the dump output.
-eval Specify elinks.conf config options on the command-line: -eval
’set protocol.file.allow_special_files = 1’
-force-html
This makes ELinks assume that the files it sees are HTML. This
is equivalent to -default-mime-type text/html.
-?, -h, -help
Print usage help and exit.
-long-help
Print detailed usage help and exit.
-config-help
Print help on configuration options and exit.
-lookup
Look up specified host.
-no-connect [0|1] (default: 0)
Run ELinks as a separate instance instead of connecting to an
existing instance. Note that normally no runtime state files
(bookmarks, history and so on) are written to the disk when
this option is used. See also -touch-files.
-no-home [0|1] (default: 0)
Don’t attempt to create and/or use home rc directory
(~/.elinks).
-session-ring <num> (default: 0)
ID of session ring this ELinks session should connect to.
ELinks works in so-called session rings, whereby all instances
of ELinks are interconnected and share state (cache, bookmarks,
cookies, and so on). By default, all ELinks instances connect
to session ring 0. You can change that behaviour with this
switch and form as many session rings as you want. Obviously,
if the session-ring with this number doesn’t exist yet, it’s
created and this ELinks instance will become the master
instance (that usually doesn’t matter for you as a user much).
Note that you usually don’t want to use this unless you’re a
developer and you want to do some testing - if you want the
ELinks instances each running standalone, rather use the -no-
connect command-line option. Also note that normally no runtime
state files are written to the disk when this option is used.
See also -touch-files.
-source [0|1] (default: 0)
Write the given HTML document in source form to stdout.
-stdin [0|1] (default: 0)
Open stdin as an HTML document - this is fully equivalent to:
-eval ’set protocol.file.allow_special_files = 1’
file:///dev/stdin Use whichever suits you more ;-). Note that
reading document from stdin WORKS ONLY WHEN YOU USE -dump OR
-source!! (I would like to know why you would use -source
-stdin, though ;-)
-touch-files [0|1] (default: 0)
Set to 1 to have runtime state files (bookmarks, history, ...)
changed even when -no-connect or -session-ring is used; has no
effect if not used in connection with any of these options.
-version
Print ELinks version information and exit.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
ELinks uses the following environments variables.
COMSPEC, SHELL
The shell used for File -> OS Shell on DOS/Windows and UNIX,
respectively.
EDITOR
The program to use for external editor (when editing textar-
eas).
ELINKS_CONFDIR
The location of the directory containing configuration files.
If not set the default is ~/.elinks/.
ELINKS_TWTERM , LINKS_TWTERM
The command to run when selecting File -> New window and if
TWDISPLAY is defined (default twterm -e)
ELINKS_XTERM , LINKS_XTERM
The command to run when selecting File -> New window and if
DISPLAY is defined (default xterm -e)
FTP_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY
The host to proxy the various protocol traffic through.
HOME The path to the users home directory. Used when expanding ~/.
WWW_HOME
Homepage location (as in lynx(1))
FILES
/etc/elinks.conf
Site-wide configuration file.
~/.elinks/elinks.conf
Per-user config file, loaded after site-wide configuration.
~/.elinks/bookmarks
Bookmarks file
~/.elinks/cookies
Cookies file
~/.elinks/formhist
Form history file
~/.elinks/gotohist
GoTo URL dialog history file
~/.elinks/globhist
History file containing last 4096 URLs visited
~/.elinks/searchhist
Search history file
~/.elinks/socket
Internal ELinks socket for communication between its instances.
PLATFORMS
ELinks is known to work on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX,
HPUX, Digital Unix, AIX, OS/2, BeOS and RISC OS. Port for Win32 is in
state of beta testing.
BUGS
See the BUGS file coming with ELinks distribution tarball for list of
known bugs.
Please report any other bugs you find to the ELinks mailing list
elinks-users@linuxfromscratch.org <URL:http://elinks.or.cz/commu-
nity.html> or the bug system <URL:http://bugzilla.elinks.or.cz/>.
LICENSE
ELinks is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
AUTHORS
Links was written by Mikulas Patocka <mikulas@artax.kar-
lin.mff.cuni.cz>. ELinks - which is based on Links - was written by a
team around Petr Baudis <pasky@ucw.cz>. See file AUTHORS in the source
tree for a list of people contributing to this project.
The homepage of ELinks can be found at http://elinks.or.cz/
<URL:http://elinks.or.cz>
This manual page was written by Peter Gervai <grin@tolna.net>, using
excerpts from a (yet?) unknown Links fan for the Debian GNU/Linux sys-
tem (but may be used by others). Contributions from Francis A. Holop.
Extended, clarified and made more up-to-date by Petr Baudis
<pasky@ucw.cz>. Updated by Zas <zas@norz.org>. The conversion to Doc-
Book for ELinks 0.5 and trimming was done by Jonas Fonseca <fon-
seca@diku.dk>.
SEE ALSO
elinkskeys(5), elinks.conf(5), links(1), lynx(1), w3m(1), wget(1)
23 December 2003 ELINKS(1)
