url_handler.pl(1)

NAME
url_handler.pl - Spawn appropriate viewer for a given URL

SYNOPSIS
url_handler.pl URL

DESCRIPTION
url_handler.pl takes a URL as argument and spawns the appropriate viewer with the URL. When running under X11 it follows $BROWSER for the following schemes: HTTP, HTTPS, GOPHER, FTP, NEWS and SNEWS; when not running under X11 $BROWSER is considered for HTTP, HTTPS, GOPHER, NEWS and SNEWS. The schemes NNTP and MAILTO (and FTP when not running under X11) are handled separately.

ENVIRONMENT

$BROWSER
    The user's preferred utility to browse URLs. May actually consist of a sequence of colon-separated browser commands to be tried in order until one succeeds. If a command part contains %s, the URL is substituted there, otherwise the browser command is simply called with the URL as its last argument. %% is replaced by a single percent sign (%), and %c is replaced by a colon (:).

SECURITY
url_handler.pl was designed to work together with tin(1) which only issues shell escaped absolute URLs thus url_handler.pl does not shell escape it's input nor does it convert relative URLs into absolute ones! If you use url_handler.pl from other applications be sure to at least shell escaped it's input!

AUTHOR
Urs Janssen <urs@tin.org>

SEE ALSO
http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/ http://www.dwheeler.com/browse/secure_browser.html