WEBCAT -- The Fastest Way to Load Web Files

Use 'webcat' to retrieve files from the World Wide Web. Invoked from the command line, webcat processes URLs and retrieves the object(s) specified, writing them to it's standard output stream. A companion command, webget, saves files on disk instead.

Webcat was inspired by 'gophercat' by Prentiss Riddle, webmaster at Rice University. Gophercat, in turn, is named for the UNIX program 'cat', with which many users are familiar. ('cat' is short for concatenate, for those who are not familiar with that utility.) Like cat, webcat can be used to concatenate objects together.

How is it fastest? Because it's so lightweight ... really. Webcat isn't a heavily-featured program. It's simple. In fact, all of the smarts to accessing the web are isolated into a webopen() function, which can be used by other applications. So the main program itself is little more than ordinary UNIX 'cat'.

Command Syntax

webcat [ -a | -i ] URL [ URL

Uses

Webcat is intended to serve as a utility program. Use it to feed other programs or even just to download files from the web. Webcat makes the download/decompress/extract process of installing software into a single command like:

webcat -i http://somehost/somepackage | gunzip | tar xvf -

For More Information

See also, the "man page" for 'webcat'.

Where to Get WEBCAT

Copyright 1995 Richard M. Troth

This page last updated
1996-Oct-29 by Rick Troth <troth@casita.houston.tx.us>.
Send mail to troth@casita.houston.tx.us.