urlview man page

urlview — URL extractor/launcher


urlview filename [ filename ... ]


urlview is a screen oriented program for extracting URLs from text files and displaying a menu from which you may launch a command to view a specific item.


urlview attempts to read ~/.urlview upon startup.  If this file doesn't exist, it will try to read a system wide file  in /etc/urlview.conf. There are two configuration commands (order does not matter):

REGEXP regexp

urlview uses a regular expression to extract URLs from the specified text files.  \r, \t, \n and \f are all converted to their normal printf(3) meanings.  The default REGEXP is:

(((http|https|ftp|gopher)|mailto):(//)?[^ <>"\t]*|(www|ftp)[0-9]?\.[-a-z0-9.]+)[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]?[^, <>"\t]*[^ .,;\t\n\r<">\):]
COMMAND command

If the specified command contains a %s, it will be subsituted with the URL that was requested, otherwise the URL is appended to the COMMAND string.  The default COMMAND is:


Note: You should never put single quotes around the %s. urlview does this for you, and also makes sure that single quotes eventually showing up inside the URL are handled properly.  (Note that this shouldn't happen with the default regular expression, which explicitly excludes single quotes.)

WRAP  choice

Enable or disable URL wrapping. Valid values for choice are: yes, no (case insensitive). If this option is not supplied, the default behaviour is to disable wrapping.


Will cause urlview to quit after you launch a URL.



system-wide urlview configuration file


urlview configuration file


If the environment variable BROWSER is set to a browser command, or a colon-delimited list of commands to try, then the specified browser is used. %s is replaced with the quoted url to view. If %s is not part of a command, the url is appended to the command.

The BROWSER environment variable is honored only if the rc-file doesn't contain the COMMAND option. The rc-file provided by the Debian package contains a COMMAND option.

See Also

printf(3), regcomp(3), regex(7), environ(7)


Michael Elkins <me@sigpipe.org>

Modified for Debian by Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@debian.org> and Emanuele Rocca <ema@debian.org>.

Modified for SuSE by Dr. Werner Fink <werner@suse.de> and Stepan Kasal <kasal@suse.cz>.


Referenced By


The man pages url_handler.sh(1) and urlview.conf(5) are aliases of urlview(1).