Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, David Moberg wrote:
>
> > On 1/4/06, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> >> Does BL3 have any way to access gopher space?
> >>
> >> Lynx works, links and wget do not (at sdf) or maybe I need to use them
> >> differently.
> >
> > Well, there's always the crude method:
> >
> > To download gopher://freeshell.org/users/pigpen/README to
> > the current directory (overwriting any file named README):
> >
> > echo /users/pigpen/README | nc freeshell.org 70 >README
>
> That works perfectly!  Is 70 a port?

Yes, it's the default port for gopher.

> How exactly does the above work?

netcat sends standard input down a network port and receives
data from the port to stdout. It's very useful. It is something like
cat or dd, only it works in a very low-level way with a network.

The line above imitates a gopher client by sending a pathname.
This is the standard way of getting a file or directory listing
with gopher. The gopher server receives this line and sends
the file or directory listing back over the network, and ash
(with the > option) pipes stdout from netcat to the local file.

You can use something similar with http:

echo -e "GET http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/ HTTP/1.0\n\n" | nc
volny.cz 80 >index.html

This will give you the BL main page, plus an HTTP header.

> > Maybe this could be made into a shell script.
>
> 'gopher'
> echo $1 | nc $2 > $3

sed could parse $1 so that you only need to execute this:

gopher gopher://freeshell.org/users/pigpen/README

But this would complicate the script.

> If I leave out the file name, and use your echo script directly, it
> downloads a list of what is in pigpen:
>
>
> ipigpen's gopher place        /users/pigpen/fake      sdf.lonestar.org      
>   70
> i---------------------  /users/pigpen/fake    sdf.lonestar.org        70
> 0README /users/pigpen/README  sdf.lonestar.org        70       *
> 1pigpen /users/pigpen/pigpen  sdf.lonestar.org        70       *
>
> Are these two files?  How can we tell the file size before downloading?

This is some kind of gopher directory listing. I don't know how to
interpret it. Maybe there is some command that can be sent to the
gopher server to get file sizes.

> >> I can get 100MB free gopherspace here to post BL files.
> >> Does it download any faster than http?
> >
> > It might be a little faster.
> Any drawbacks?

None that I can see, except that it is not HTTP. But FTP has the
same problem.

> I wonder why busybox and links don't do gopher.

Too rare of a protocol. It's only bloat.

David