Environment Variables

Certain environment variables that have an effect on w3browse are given in the following list:

HOME

USERPROFILE

The first non-empty value is used for the path to the home directory of the current user. If none can be found, the installation directory of w3browse is used instead. The configuration file w3browse.rdf is expected there, and that directory is the starting point of file selection dialogs.

USER

USERNAME

LOGNAME

All names are tried in order and the first non-empty value is used as the name of the current user. If none can be found, the value "unknown" is used instead.

PATH

The value of this variable specifies a list of directories where to find external programs, e.g. gzip for decompression. w3browse internally prepends its own installation directory to this list in order to be able to locate certain helper programs, e.g. gethost or termxsrv.

DISPLAY

If w3browse is about to open an X window, it uses the value of this variable in deciding which X server to contact. This value is passed to termxsrv if needed.

LINES

COLUMNS

The two environment variables, when set, specify the size of the output screen if w3browse is instructed to use a tty for display. The default screen size is 80x25.

TERMTYPE

If w3browse uses a tty as display device and the value of TERMTYPE is set to "ibmpc", then w3browse tries to switch the terminal into an IBM-PC compatible mode in which block graphic characters are also available. This works at least on a console under Linux running on a PC.

TERMXSRV_HOST

Specifies the IP address and/or port of a server process that is able to start a termxsrv process which in turn should be used to display the GUI window of w3browse. The syntax is:

TERMXSRV_HOST=ip-address[:port]

The default port is 8162.

On UNIX-like systems, one possible choice for starting a remote termxsrv process on demand is to use inetd or a similar program for this task. Appending a line such as

termxsrv stream tcp nowait nobody.nogroup /PATH/TO/TERMXSRV/termxsrv termxsrv -display :0 -

to /etc/inetd.conf does the trick. "nobody.nogroup" may be replaced by another appropriate value. The same is valid for the value of the option -display. A service named termxsrv should be added to /etc/services with

termxsrv 8162/tcp

before restarting inetd. And finally, the termxsrv processes that are started by inetd must have permission to connect to the X server that is specified by the -display option.