
Although 99%of the world browses websites with some version of a graphical client, there can be times when it could be useful to have command-line access to a website.
Imagine a scenario where your home machine uses DSL or a cable modem, and is "net-connected" 24 hours a day. You're at the office one day, and notice a site that has a file you want to download, but it's only available via a web browser. If you've enabled remote connectivity to your home box (via telnet or SSH), you could connect to home, launch a text-based browser, and start the file download on the home machine. There are also command-line utilites that can do this for you (cURL is one of them; there's an OS X version here), but the text-browser is also useful as a, well, browser!
links is an excellent text-based browser that works very well in OS X. The small screenshot at the top of this article is of links displaying this site; here's the full-size screenshot. Read the rest of this article if you'd like instructions on downloading and installing links for OS X. You could also use lynx, another text browser; search this site on 'lynx' for more info.
The difficult way to install links is to download the source from the home page and compile it. Luckily, a macosxhints reader has already done that, making the process much simpler. Here are the required steps:
- Download the links program from macosxhints' anonymous FTP site. The filename is links.tar.gz, and it's about 474K in size. If anyone knows of another spot where this can be found on the web, please let me know and I'll add a link.
- Unpack the tar file, preferably with OpenUp.
- This will create a links_0 folder, inside of which is the links application.
- Open a terminal session, and become the root user by typing su and your password.
- Assuming you used OpenUp, the file will be located in your Library/OpenUp directory. We need to put it in /usr/local/bin so that it will be easily usable. Type the following:
mv /Users/username/Library/OpenUp/links /usr/local/bin/
NOTE If you do not have a /usr/local/bin directory, create it first. As root, type 'cd /usr/local' then 'mkdir bin'.
If you didn't use OpenUp, then change the first part of the path to reflect the location of the application.
- Next, we'll set the owner and group for the application:
cd /usr/local/bin
chown root:wheel links - Exit your root session by typing exit.

