How to call lynx on URL inside a program

Question

During my LaTeX typesetting I need to "visually" check if URLs point to reacheable pages. I'd like to do it with lynx in a separate emacs buffer so I wrote this function:

(defun urls-check-if-working-link ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (let* ((a (copy-marker (point-min)))
       (case-fold-search nil)
       (enable-recursive-minibuffers t))

      (goto-char a)
      (while (search-forward-regexp "\\\\\\(?:href\\|url\\){\\([^}]+\\)}" nil t)
    (save-excursion
      (let ((URL (match-string 1)))

        (unless (or
             ;; 1 - Commented String
             (nth 4 (syntax-ppss)) 

             ;; 2 - It's a DOI
             (string-match-p "doi\\.org" URL))

          ;; (eww-browse-url URL)
          (shell-command (concat "lynx " URL))

          ;; taking time to do something:
          (read-string (concat URL ": TEST"))))))

      )))

Running it I get the error:

Your Terminal type is unknown!

I found I need to use ansi-term to make lynx work. The command:

(ansi-term "lynx" "*BUFFER-NAME*")

works, but I'm not able to make it open a given URL. I mean something like:

(ansi-term "lynx https://www.google.com" "*BUFFER-NAME*")

Where I'm doing wrong?
Do you suggest a different approach?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '18 at 16:24

ansi-term doesn't support arguments. PROGRAM means an executable file. COMMAND usually means a shell command.

You can use eshell-command (it works out-of-box because eshell-visual-commands includes lynx)

M-x eshell-command RET lynx http://example.com RET

or in Lisp

(eshell-command "lynx http://example.com")

and term-ansi-make-term works as well

(term-ansi-make-term "*BUFFER-NAME*" "lynx" nil "http://example.com")

How to call lynx on URL inside a program

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