IO-Slaves

bzip is a compression program. It is rarely used today, having been replaced with bzip2, which offers much better compression.

The bzip kioslave is not directly usable, and is intended for use as a filter. For example, the tar kioslave can filter a file through the bzip kioslave, in order to display the contents of a tar.bz file directly in a Konqueror window.

If you click on a file compressed with a bz extension in Konqueror, this kioslave is used to uncompress it and display it as a normal (uncompressed) file.

If you are a developer, and would like to use the bzip filter, you can find documentation on using kioslaves at http://developer.kde.org

Bzip2 is a compression program

The bzip2 kioslave is not directly usable, and is intended for use as a filter. For example, the tar kioslave can filter a file through the bzip2 kioslave, in order to display the contents of a tar.bz2 file directly in a Konqueror window.

If you click on a file compressed with a .bz2 in Konqueror, this kioslave is used to uncompress it and display it as a normal (uncompressed) file.

If you are a developer, and would like to use the bzip2 filter, you can find documentation on using kioslaves at http://developer.kde.org

See the manual: bzip2.

The CGI slave provides a way to execute CGI programs without the need to have a running web server. This can for example be used for local testing of CGI programs or for using search engines that only provide a CGI frontend like the one from Doxygen.

The slave implements the cgi: protocol. It uses the filename from the given URL and searches a configurable list of folders. If it finds an executable with the given name it executes it, passes the arguments of the URL and sets the environment variables needed by CGI programs.

Data URLs allow small document data to be included in the URL itself. This is useful for very small HTML testcases or other occasions that do not justify a document of their own.

data:,foobar (note the comma after the colon) will deliver a text document that contains nothing but foobar

The last example delivered a text document. For HTML documents one has to specify the MIME type text/html: data:text/html,<title>Testcase</title><p>This is a testcase</p>. This will produce exactly the same output as if the content had been loaded from a document of its own.

Specifying alternate character sets is also possible. Note that 8-Bit characters have to be escaped by a percentage sign and their two-digit hexadecimal codes: data:;charset=iso-8859-1,Gr%FC%DFe aus Schl%E4gl results in Grüße aus Schlägl whereas omitting the charset attribute might lead to something like Gr??e aus Schl?gl

IETF RFC2397 provides more information.

The file protocol is used by all KDE applications to display locally available files.

Entering file:/directoryname in Konqueror lists the files of this folder.

Finger is a program to display information about users.

If finger is enabled on the remote machine, you may be given information on the user's real name, if they are currently logged in, if they have mail and the text of their .plan file in their home folder.

Finger is normally associated with a user@hostname address, which may or may not be the same as a users email address.

Most Internet Service Providers no longer allow finger access, so, you may find that you get no useful answer for most people.

Other people use their local .plan file to hold such information as PGP keys, the fact they are on vacation, and all sorts of information.

Use the finger kioslave like this: finger://username@hostname

See the manual: finger.

Allows you to access another computer's files using a simple SSH shell account and standard UNIX® utilities on the remote side. This way, no server software is needed and you gain access to that computer's files as if they were local (or on NFS, since it is slower than local access). It uses the same protocol as MidnightCommander's #sh VFS handler.

Fish should work with any roughly POSIX compatible UNIX® based remote computer. It uses the shell commands cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, cp, dd, env, expr, grep, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, rmdir, sed, and wc. Fish starts /bin/sh as its shell and expects it to be a Bourne shell (or compatible, like bash). If the sed and file commands are available, as well as a /etc/apache/magic file with MIME type signatures, these will be used to guess MIME types.

If Perl is available on the remote machine, it will be used instead. Then only env and /bin/sh are needed. Using Perl has the additional benefit of being faster.

Fish may even work on Windows® machines, if tools like Cygwin are installed. All the above utilities must be in the system PATH, and the initial shell must be able to process the command echo FISH:;/bin/sh correctly.

The floppy ioslave gives you easy access to the floppy disk drives installed on your system.

The drive letter becomes the first subdirectory in the floppy URL. Let's say there is a file logo.png on your floppy disk in drive A, then the URL will be floppy:/a/logo.png

If you want to access drive B, floppy:/b will do it. floppy:/ is a shortcut for floppy:/a.

To use it you need to have the mtools package installed, and the floppy ioslave supports everything the various mtools command line utilities support. You don't have to mount your floppy disks, simply enter floppy:/ in any KDE 3.x app and you will be able to read from and write to your floppy drive.

It also works with USB sticks, ZIP and JAZ drives. You can use floppy:/u for the USB stick and floppy:/z for the zip drive, for example. To make this work, you might need to adjust your /etc/mtools file. See the manpage for documentation.

The ioslave gives read and write access to the floppy drive, but not simultaneously. While you can read and write to the floppy during the same session, reading and writing have to happen one after the other, not at the same time.

Author: Alexander Neundorf (neundorf AT kde.org)

FTP is the Internet service used to transfer a data file from the disk of one computer to the disk of another, regardless of the operating system type.

Similar to other Internet applications, FTP uses the client-server approach — a user invokes an FTP program on the computer, instructs it to contact a remote computer, and then requests the transfer of one or more files. The local FTP program becomes a client that uses TCP to contact an FTP server program on the remote computer. Each time the user requests a file transfer, the client and the server programs cooperate to send a copy of the data across the Internet.

FTP servers which allow “anonymous FTP” permit any user, not only users with accounts on the host, to browse the “ftp” archives and download files. Some FTP servers are configured to allow users to upload files.

FTP is commonly used to retrieve information and obtain software stored in files at FTP archive sites throughout the world.

Source: Paraphrased from http://tlc.nlm.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/internetdistlrn/ftpdef.htm

See the manual: ftp.

gopher began as a distributed campus information service at the University of Minnesota. Gopher allows the user to access information on Gopher servers running on Internet hosts.

Gopher is an Internet information browsing service that uses a menu-driven interface. Users select information from menus, which may return another menu or display a text file. An item may reside on a Gopher server you originally queried, or it may be on another Gopher server (or another host). Gopher can “tunnel” from one Gopher to another without the user knowing that the server and/or host machine have changed. Gopher keeps the exact location of computers hidden from the user, providing the “illusion” of a single, large set of interconnected menus.

Gopher permits the user to record an item's location in a “bookmark” thereby allowing users to follow a “bookmark” directly to a particular item without searching the menu system. Gopher menus are not standardised, inasmuch as each Gopher server is individually determined.

Source: http://tlc.nlm.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/internetdistlrn/gophrdef.htm

gzip is a compression program

The gzip kioslave is not directly usable, and is intended for use as a filter. For example, the tar kioslave can filter a file through the gzip kioslave, in order to display the contents of a tar.gz file directly in a Konqueror window.

If you click on a file compressed with a gz extension in Konqueror, this kioslave is used to uncompress it and display it as a normal (uncompressed) file.

If you are a developer, and would like to use the gzip filter, you can find documentation on using kioslaves at http://developer.kde.org

See the manual: gzip.

The help system of KDE

See The KHelpCenter.

http is the HyperText Transfer Protocol.

The http kioslave is used by all KDE applications to handle connections to http servers, that is, web servers. The most common usage is to view web pages in the Konqueror web browser.

You can use the http kioslave in Konqueror by giving it a URL. http://www.kde.org.

See the manual: http.

HTTPS is HTTP encapsulated in an SSL/TLS stream.

SSL is the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery.

TLS stands for Transport Layer Security

The IMAP4rev1 protocol (Internet Message Access Protocol) allows access to messages in mail folders on a server. Unlike POP3, which is designed to download the mails and delete them from the server, the purpose of IMAP is to store all mails on the server to be able to access these mails from everywhere. Messages can be stored on the server, retrieved from there or moved between folders.

This plugin is currently mainly used by KMail, but you can also use it in any other KDE application that uses kioslave plugins.

For example in Konqueror, simply type imap://username@your.mail.server/ to get your IMAP folders listed. You can then deal with the folders and mails like with folders and files on a local file system. IMAP URLs are defined in RFC 2192.

IMAPS is the IMAP protocol encrypted via SSL.

Info is a type of documentation. The documents are in a file format called texinfo, and can be read on the command line with the info program.

The Info ioslave allows you to read the info pages installed on your system, from within Konqueror. You can use it very easily:

info:/gcc

This would show you the top level node of the Info documentation for the gcc compiler.

Info is a GNU replacement for man, but is not widely used outside of GNU software.

You can quite easily browse the info documentation you have installed from within the KHelpCenter application, or you can use the info ioslave directly from within both Konqueror and the mini-cli.

This protocol is intended to provide a kind of “network neighbourhood” but only relying on the TCP/IP protocol stack and with the ability to use other protocols than just SMB.

The lan kioslave can use FTP, HTTP, SMB, NFS, and FISH

It must first be configured in KControl, Network->LAN-Browsing and for more information see the Lan Browsing manual.

ldap is the lightweight directory access protocol. It provides access to an X.500 directory, or to a stand-alone LDAP server.

You can use the ldap kioslave as follows:

ldap://host:port/ou=People,o=where,c=de??sub for a subtree-query

or ldap://host:port/cn=MM,ou=People,o=where,c=de??base for a complete branch.

The mailto kioslave is used when you click on a mailto link in an HTML page. Konqueror will open the preferred mail client you have configured, with a composer window. Any information supplied in the URL will be filled in for you.

See the manual: mailto.

The mac ioslave lets you read an HFS+ partition from Konqueror or any other KDE file dialogue. It uses hfsplus tools, so you will need these installed for it to work.

Enter mac:/ into Konqueror and you should see the contents of your Mac® OS partition. If you have not used kio-mac before, you will probably get an error message saying you have not specified the right partition. Enter something like mac:/?dev=/dev/hda2 to specify the partition (if you don't know which partition Mac® OS is on, you can probably guess by changing hda2 to hda3 and so on or use the print command from mac-fdisk). This partition will be used the next time, so you do not have to specify it each time.

Hfsplus tools let you see the file and copy data from the HFS+ partition, but not to copy data to it or change the filenames.

HFS+ actually keeps two files for every one you see (called forks), a resource fork and a data fork. The default copy mode when you are copying files across to your native drive is raw data, which means it only copies the data fork. Text files are copied in text mode (same as raw format but changes the line endings to be UNIX® friendly and gets rid of some extra characters - strongly advised for text files), unless you specify otherwise. You can also copy the files across in Mac Binary II format or specify text or raw format with another query: mac:/myfile?mode=b or mac:/myfile?mode=t. See the hpcopy man page for more.

Note that you need permissions to read your HFS+ partition. How you get this depends on your distribution.

For some reason some folders in Mac® OS end in a funny tall “f” character. This seems to confuse hfstools.

Using the man ioslave you are able to read the man pages installed on your system. It is easy to use:

There is also a shortcut: #fopen, which has the same effect as above.

If you don't find all your man pages, adjust the environment variables MANPATH and MANSECT.

As with any other KDE ioslave, it is possible to enter a URL, like man:socket in any KDE application. Try it in KWrite and you will see the man page in HTML format.

Contact mailing list: (kde-devel AT kde.org)

MRML stands for Multimedia Retrieval Markup Language. MRML is an XML-based protocol to provide standardised access to Multimedia retrieval software. See http://www.mrml.net for more information.

kio_mrml is used for the Image Finding feature in KDE

e.g. type mrml:/ or mrml:/some.other.server in Konqueror to start searching for images.

The news kioslave is used when you click on a news link on a web page. It will open KNode, and if the group referred to in the news link is available from your server, it will subscribe you to the group, in the first available account you have configured in KNode

You can unsubscribe from within KNode if you decide you don't want to read the group, by right clicking and selecting Unsubscribe from Group.

Sun's NFS protocol provides transparent remote access to shared file systems across networks. The NFS protocol is designed to be machine, operating system, network architecture, and transport protocol independent. This independence is achieved through the use of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) primitives built on top of an eXternal Data Representation (XDR).

The supporting MOUNT protocol performs the operating system-specific functions that allow clients to attach remote folder trees to a point within the local file system. The mount process also allows the server to grant remote access privileges to a restricted set of clients via export control.

The Lock Manager provides support for file locking when used in the NFS environment. The Network Lock Manager (NLM) protocol isolates the inherently stateful aspects of file locking into a separate protocol.

Source: http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/nfs.htm

See the manual: nfs.

The nntp kioslave accesses NNTP servers directly.

This kioslave can not be used with servers that do not implement the GROUP command, including some versions of the popular INN news server which is often used by ISPs. It does work with leafnode, which many people use to keep an offline cache of news articles on their own hard drive or within their LAN.

You can use the nntp kioslave by typing nntp://yourserver/groupname into the Konqueror URL bar.

If you enter a group name, as above, and the group is available, you will see the messages stored for that group as icons in Konqueror.

Clicking on a message will display it as plain text, including all headers. This could be useful for debugging a news client to news server connection, for example, to ensure that your new leafnode server is working correctly.

If you don't enter a group name, and only the server name, you will see a list of available groups.

Please be aware that this could take an enormous amount of time, and will cause a lot of network traffic. Some commercial usenet servers have 60,000 or more groups available, and doing such a thing may cause your desktop to freeze.

The Post Office Protocol (POP3) allows a user's workstation to access mail from a mailbox server.

POP3S is the POP3 protocol encrypted via SSL.

The print KIOSlave gives quick access to browse different KDEPrint sections via “virtual folders”. These folders provide some information about and quick access to your print subsystem.

print:/ represents one more of those useful KIOSlaves implemented by KDE. To access it, just type print:/ into the address field of Konqueror. print:/ doesn't purely provide “read-only” access to your print subsystem, but it also allows you to change settings of your printers, of your print system and lets you create new printers and classes.

You are asked for the Administrator or root password, if you are not allowed a view or an operation as a normal user.

You can bookmark frequently used shortcuts like print:/manager

Valid syntax is either print:/[path-to-virtual-folder] or print:[path-to-virtual-folder]

Note, that some of the views and actions offered do heavily depend on the print subsystem that is installed on your box and presently activated for KDE. Pages showing printer information display only those parts that are valid for the KDE selected print subsystem. (So if you normally run CUPS, but switched temporarily to “Generic UNIX LPD Printing”, which is possible, you will see less printer info, because LPD is not capable of using the same amount of print settings as are possible in CUPS).

Valid syntax to access different virtual folders and a short explanation of what they represent:

You can learn more about printing and KDEPrint's powerful abilities by reading the KDEPrint Handbook locally or at the KDEPrint Website where there are documents online (HTML and PDF),containing Tutorials, as well as FAQs and Tips and Tricks related to printing in general.

Not yet documented

Using Konqueror you can start up an rlogin session with a server hosting the rlogin service.

To use this kioslave feature, in the Konqueror URL bar, type rlogin:/host_to_connect_to

This will initialise Konsole with an rlogin session, prompting you for your password.

The rlogin kioslave uses the username of the account you are currently using in KDE.

After you have successfully entered your password, you can begin your remote session.

See the manual: rlogin.

SFTP is a Secure file transfer protocol. sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp, but it performs all operations over an encrypted ssh transport. It may use many of the features of ssh, including public key authentication and compression.

See the manual: sftp.

The smb ioslave enables you to browse the shares of a Windows® (or Samba) network.

To see the workgroups, enter smb:/.

smb:/a_workgroup will list the hosts in this workgroup.

To see the shares of a host, enter smb://the_host or smb:/a_workgroup/the_host.

To access a share directly enter smb://the_host/the_share or smb:/a_workgroup/the_host/the_share

The smb ioslave is a wrapper around the command line tool smbclient, which is part of the Samba package. This means you need to have Samba installed to use this ioslave.

To be able to authenticate to Windows® NT Domain Controllers, you need at least Samba 2.0. To access the shares of Windows® 2000 machines, you need at least Samba 2.0.7. To be able to write to Windows shares, you need at least Samba 2.2.4 or the patch from http://lisa-home.sourceforge.net/smbclientpatch.html.

You can set your default user name and password in the KControl in Network->Windows Shares. This is especially useful if you are a member of a Windows® NT domain. There you can also set your workgroup name, but in most cases this is not required.

This ioslave is tested and developed using mainly Samba 2.0.7, but other versions of Samba should work too.

Author: Alexander Neundorf (neundorf AT kde.org)

A protocol to send mail from the client workstation to the mail server.

See : Simple Mail Transfer Protocol .

An archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive, however, it is also common to write a tarfile to a normal file.

See the manual: tar.

The network terminal protocol (TELNET) allows a user to log in on any other computer on the network supporting TELNET.

See the manual: telnet.

The thumbnail kioslave is used by KDE for network transparent and persistent generation of thumbnails.

The thumbnail kioslave uses plugins to generate the actual thumbnails. You can enable viewing of these thumbnails from the View->Preview submenu, available in Konqueror in file manager mode.

The thumbnail kioslave is not directly useful to a user, but if you are a developer, you can use it within your own applications to create file previews.

See the documentation in the sources for more information. You will find these at $KDEDIR/include/kio/thumbcreator.h or in the source folder kdebase/kioslave/thumbnail

WebDAV is a Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol for the World Wide Web. It allows for easy management of documents and scripts on a http server, and has additional features designed to simplify version management amongst multiple authors.

Usage of this protocol is simple. Type the location you want to view, similar to a http URL except for the webdav:// protocol name at the start. An example is webdav://www.hostname.com/path/. If you specify a folder name, a list of files and folders will be displayed, and you can manipulate these folders and files just as you would with any other filesystem.

To take advantage of these additional capabilities, you will need an application which supports them. No application currently supports them through this kioslave.

WebDAVS is the WebDAV protocol encrypted via SSL.