9 Remote Access Utility

catremote runs a separate utility program to submit the URL representing the query of a remote catalogue and retrieve the results. The utility to be used is not hard-wired into catremote, but rather is specified using environment variable CATREM_URLREADER (see Section 4). Several options are available:

geturl is the default on Starlink systems. It is reasonably fast, as are lynx and and wget, though UrlReader seems somewhat slower. Brief details of using the various options follow.

geturl
specify:
  % setenv CATREM_URLREADER "/star/bin/cursa/geturl"
UrlReader
specify:
  % setenv CATREM_URLREADER  "java  UrlReader"

It is also necessary to set the java environment variable CLASSPATH so that UrlReader is picked up in addition to the standard Java classes. For example, I might set:

  % setenv CLASSPATH /star/bin/cursa:/usr/lib/netscape/java/classes

Note that it is necessary to specify the location of UrlReader using CLASSPATH rather than the corresponding Java command-line option because the latter appears not to work on Compaq Alpha/Tru64.

lynx
specify:
  % setenv  CATREM_URLREADER  "lynx -source"
wget
specify:
  % setenv  CATREM_URLREADER  "wget -q -O -"

wget is distributed as part of RedHat Linux systems and will probably only be available as part of such systems. On these systems an on-line manual can be accessed by typing:

  % info  wget

4http://lynx.browser.org/