make a symlink to a webpage?

[Norberto Meijome]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:17:53 -0400
Schiz0 <schiz0phrenic21 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/16/07, Steve Franks <stevefranks at ieee.org> wrote:
> > I know this is browser-specific, so let's just say firefox - how do I
> > make a link to a page that I can execute directly?   This is not the
> > type of thing that's easy to google for.  I tried copying some of the
> > ".url" links from my win32 box and opening them with firefox, but that
> > was just wishful thinking...
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Steve
> 
> I'm not sure if you can, to be honest. (Although I may be wrong).
> Windows lets you do this because the .url extension is associated with
> your browser through the windows registry

that's correct - *url is loaded by  iexplore "%1" , if i remember correctly.
The .url file is a simple .ini file with a different extension so it can be
mapped to a special application.

>. Hardly any other operating
> systems have a registry type thing...
> (I don't even think mac has one).

you don't need a 'system wide' registry... everything in current Microsoft OS
is so integrated with the shell ('win.com' in the old win16 days) that it feels
so seem-less.

Under a unix graphic environment like X, all you have to do is map the
extention to an application (more on this below) in your file manager of choice.
Rox lets you such thing, so does Thunar under XFCE,and I am 99.9% sure that
nautilus and kde's file browser would allow it too. OSX has it too (can't
test MacOS, but i'm sure you can click on an icon an have an application open
it - that is ALL there is to it)

Hardly rocket science or ground breaking stuff by MS..

If i understand it correctly, gconf exists to generate a registry type
system.
wine also has a u*x-based  registry equivalent.

> What you could do is make a shell script that executes your browser
> with a command line option with the URL. Check the docs for your
> browser, almost every browser lets you do this. Like "firefox
> -url=http://asdf.com" or something.

exactly. actually, i had this old script from back when to extract URLs
from .url into a csv file :

--
#!/usr/bin/bash
export IFS=";"

find -name "*.url" -printf %p\; > myfavs.txt

for i in `cat myfavs.txt` ; do 
    echo -n `basename $i .url` >>myfavs.csv
    echo \|`grep ^URL= $i  | cut -d= -f2` >> myfavs.csv; done

---
it was run in win32 under cygwin. it'd be trivial to change it so that your
file manager passes the .url filename to the script, the script greps the URL
from it and calls firefox with -url as Schiz says.

B

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{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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