between google and firefox it's nearly impossible to get anything done!

Mon Apr 15 12:30:43 UTC 2019

(Tim here) The suggestion was for piping it to xsel/clip which puts it
on your system X clipboard for whatever purposes you want (pasting
into firefox or an email or a chat window or whatever).

Reading further in the thread, it sounds like  you only had the one
URL in the file and that Firefox was local on your machine so you
should be able to do as Geoff suggested and expand the file at the
shell-prompt.  Make sure you use either the backticks that Geoff
suggests or the "$(...)" that I suggested.  It executes the commands
inside them (in this case the "cat file.txt") and then replaces them
in the command-line, making it something like

  firefox "http://example.com/really/long/url/goes/here"

If you frequently use this file for exchanging between surf and
firefox, you can even make a function/alias for it

  surff() { firefox "$(cat ~/surf)" ; }

and then type "surff" and it will launch firefox on whatever URL is
in that file.  Alternatively, your window-manager might let you
create a hot-key to spawn that command so you only have to hit a
single button.

-tim

On April 15, 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> It's not possible to pipe anything to firefox.  I need a javascript
> browser that can handle pipes for this one.  I'm going with my
> braille paper solution since I don't want to waste more time on
> this.  This is a situation mozilla never imagined would come up I'm
> sure.
> 
> On Mon, 15 Apr 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> 
> > Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 07:26:24
> > From: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com>
> > To: blinux-list at redhat.com
> > Subject: Re: between google and firefox it's nearly impossible to
> > get anything done!
> >
> > Tim here.  Are you trying to open firefox on the same machine or
> > on a different machine, and if a different machine, what
> > operating system is that other machine running?
> >
> > If it's the same machine, I'd recommend using xsel or xclip (one
> > might already be installed; otherwise, I prefer xsel over xclip).
> > You can then use a standard pipeline to extract the line from the
> > file and put it in the system clipboard.  If the URL is the only
> > thing in the file, it's pretty easy:
> >
> >   xsel -ib < url_file.txt
> >
> > This puts the URL in your system clipboard so you can use
> > control+V to paste it into the address-bar in Firefox.
> >
> > If you have multiple URLs in the file, you might want to tag them
> > with a keyword to help you find them:
> >
> >   email https://gmail.com
> >   long http://example.com/long/path/to/page
> >
> > You can then extract the URLs with awk and pipe to xsel:
> >
> >   awk '$1 == "long"{print $2}' | xsel -ib
> >
> > or even wrap it in a shell function in your .bashrc/.bash_profile
> >
> >   url() {
> >     awk -vNAME="$1" '$1 == NAME{print $2}' | xsel -ib
> >   }
> >
> > which would then let you type
> >
> >   $ url long
> >
> > to get that long URL in your clipboard.
> >
> > If you're trying to get it onto another machine, it would depend
> > on the OS and what tools you have for connecting to the Linux box.
> > MacOS has a similar pbcopy/pbpaste command that would let you SSH
> > into your Linux box, search for the URL there, emitting the
> > result, and then piping that into pbcopy for local use.  I'm
> > afraid I don't have recent Windows experience to determine how
> > that would work over on Windows.
> >
> > Hopefully this gives you some ideas and saves you a lot of
> > hand-transcribing of URLs.
> >
> > -tim
> >
> > On April 15, 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:  
> > > I have a long ugly google url stored in a file.  It's stored in
> > > a file so if I find a browser that works with javascript and
> > > can take an url from a file when the browser gets started and
> > > open that url for me I can maybe get this done.  The long ugly
> > > url is over 200 characters long which is why I would like to
> > > avoid keying it all in.
> > >
> > > I just thought of something.  This will even work with firefox
> > > but it's only for us braille users who write braille on paper
> > > and have plenty of paper.  I could rewrite the url on paper so
> > > it's split into 5 character groups and have commas separating
> > > each of the groups and as I key in each group change the comma
> > > to a semicolon so I know that group already got keyed in and
> > > move along to the next group.
> > >
> > > On Sun, 14 Apr 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> > >  
> > > > Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2019 14:36:40
> > > > From: Linux for blind general discussion
> > > > <blinux-list at redhat.com> To: Linux for blind general
> > > > discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com> Subject: Re: between
> > > > google and firefox it's nearly impossible to get anything
> > > > done!
> > > >
> > > > I am unsure what you are trying to accomplish, but have you
> > > > tried e-links, or links the chain  instead?
> > > > Both browsers are included in Debian distributions of Linux.
> > > > It may still require some extra compile work  for e-links to
> > > > use Javascript some, links the chain can do so, I am told as
> > > > of about a month ago, even in DOS. Generally I  have no
> > > > issues using the Google services I need in lynx, but I am not
> > > > doing anything with YouTube. Kare
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, 14 Apr 2019, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> > > >  
> > > > > I found out a few minutes ago it's not possible to do
> > > > > something like: firefox < /home/jude/surf
> > > > > Where /home/jude/surf has an ugly google url in it that
> > > > > cannot be processed by
> > > > > lynx since google and so very many other web sites love
> > > > > blocking what doesn't use javascript.
> > > > > I was going to get an authentication token on this box so I
> > > > > could use youtube-viewer in a logged in state but that's not
> > > > > going to happen at all.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > >
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