The goal of Web Commander is to give users an easy way of saving web documents to a server, and loading them to a local file or deleting them from a server. Web Commander has three basic commands corresponding to the goals: save, load and delete. If necessary, it is also possible to use the tool to do some advanced settings.
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The most common use of this tool is when a user wants to save a document residing locally on his or her computer to a web server (HTTP server). This can be done by using the save document command. First you need to fill in the Source field with your local document name or use the Browse button to select the document. The Destination field contains the web address where you file is going to be saved to. To do the save you just need to press the Submit button and you are done after you receive a feedback message. In some rare occasions you may get an error message back. Usually this is because of a version conflict.
When the document that is being saved resides in your local disk, it has file: at the beginning of the document pathname referring to local file address schema. The document may also reside on an FTP server or on an HTTP server. In that case ftp: and http: schemas are used correspondingly.
Web Commander can handle any type of document including binary formats, tar files, programs, etc.
If somebody has saved an updated version of the same document that you are trying to save, Web Commander detects it and asks you what to do.
This feature can be turned on and off under the Options menu.
Normally these settings are not needed while saving the documents. If you want to see what guesses are automatically being made of your source document, push the Guess button.
Normally these settings are not needed. They can be used to add document relations to set of documents. For instance, if you are writing a book, you can define with next and prev type links that the source document containing one chapter of the book comes after one document and is before another.
You can also use Web Commander to simply load a document either from an HTTP server or an FTP server. The cache directives can help you reloading a document that you know has been changed in the mean time. Normally you can just use the default setting which is to get the nearest version that appears fresh.
Web Commander can be used to delete a document on an HTTP server
The proxy setup is very flexible as you can use regular expressions to say which request should go there. In this example, all requests going to http://jigedit.w3.org/* are tunnelled through a local host SSH tunnel ensuring real security. You can also do things like proxying all requests ending in ".png" though a particular proxy.
It could of course also be a normal HTTP proxy sitting on a firewall.