Lynx and temporary files for large downloads

Peter Rukavina

I’m still a heavy user of the text-only Lynx web browser. It was my first browser, and it’s still near and dear to my heart.

These days I mostly use Lynx on the server side to navigate web pages that lead to software downloads. It saves transferring from my local machine to a remote machine.

Today, downloading a particularly huge 500MB file from IBM, I found that Lynx was placing its temporary file for the download in my home directory, which, alas, had little space, and certainly not enough to hold 500MB of data.

The solution?

export LYNX_TEMP_SPACE=/directory/with/lots/of/space

Set this environment variable, and then run Lynx, and you’ll find that Lynx will use the location you specify as its location for the temporary file.

Comments

Submitted by nathan on

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To download files to a server, I typically browse for a file with Mozilla on my desktop and then copy/paste the link into a terminal window that’s logged into the server. The link can then be used with wget to download the file.

Submitted by za on

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wget only possible for permanent link, sometimes there are cases when we face only temporary link.

Submitted by Greg on

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I like
export LYNX_TEMP_SPACE=.
which means they go straight to the current directory

Submitted by Gube on

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Ran into the same problem all these years later with Lynx downloading a very large file into a live system running in RAM.

It can be hard to find these tips quickly, especially in the Lynx documentation.

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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