How to use file protocol to access a directory on local system?

Question

like /usr/local?

I tried file:///usr/local but failed

[root@www2 robot]# cd file:///usr/local
-bash: cd: file:///usr/local: No such file or directory

Solution 1

If you have a requirement to be able to access generic URLs from your shell, try using curl as a replacement for your cat:

curl file:///path/to/file.txt
curl http://www.domain.com/file.txt

But as other posters have pointed out, the shell itself doesn't understand URLs.

Solution 2

If you have to deal with file:///usr/local on the command line, you could just remove the "file://" part. And do then a normal your command, e.g.:

echo "file:///usr/local/" |  sed 's/file:\/\///' | cd

Comments

[Venedictos]

If your talking about FireFox, then yes, I know, I slipped, shame on me. It's fixed now though.

[supercheetah]

Not necessarily wget, but rather curl (i.e. "cat url").

[Pete]

"the file: protocol only exists in web browers"? Not so. The URL for a file is not something that is limited to web browsers. For example, as an argument to the collection() XPath function to get a group of XML docs from the local disk.