Customizing www

Customizing www 's behaviour is done with environment variables or their equivalent.

" Environment variable " is a unix term. On VMS you should use a logical name . Under VM/CMS use a global variable .

You can also customise www by defining your own "www" command to invoke www with certain command line options set, such as the page length. See also how to make shortcut commands (aliases) .

A list of things you can customize with environment variables (or local equivalents) are as follows:-

WWW_HOME

The address of the first document to start with if you run www without a document name on the command line. For example, you can set it to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/LineMode/Defaults/default.html if you want to always use the home page on the CERN information server.

As the line mode browser is installed, it comes with a default copy of that home page, frozen at the time when the distribution was made. That page has (right at the bottom) a link back to the current version on our server. If you are installing www without privileges, you may not be able to install the home page, and so you will have to set WWW_HOME to point to a local copy of the file, or to our server.

You can customize www to start at a page of your choice. You can write your own page, or use someone else's. All you have to do is to set the environment variable WWW_HOME to the www address of your preferred home page. (When you are using www, you can see what an address looks like by typing help when you are reading a document - it tells you the address of that node).

NNTPSERVER

See how to set up the news server's address .

WWW_PRINT_COMMAND

Unix only. A quoted printf-style format string for the system command you wish to invoke with the www PRINT command. This should contain one %s marker where www should put the name of the document to be printed. The default is www -n -na -p66 '%s' | lpr (The single quotes around the %s are necessary in case the address contains shell metacharacters. When you define this variable, you may of course have to enclose the whole thing in double quotes, e.g. setenv WWW_PRINT_COMMAND "www -n -na -p66 '%s' | lpr"
Tim BL