URL: Uniform Resource Locator

The action done on the hypertext link depends on both the type of link it is (the URL), and the file name (its extension) itself.

The general syntax of a URL is

URL-type://system/path

where

• URL-type is defined in table 1.10.
• system is the name of the system on the network (may also include additional information such as account name, password, and/or port number of server)
• path is the path name of the document or directory to be accessed.

An example would be

http://www.nrc.ca/imsb/rcsg/unix_course

Table 1.10: URL types and descriptions.

URL type	Description
ftp	allows connection to anonymous FTP servers
http	accesses web server with HTML documents
gopher	accesses gopher servers
telnet	opens telnet session
file	opens local HTML file
mailto	opens builtin mail tool to send mail
news	connects to news server