URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator" -- it tends to be associated with
the World-Wide Web, though it's a more general-purpose tool than that.  In
this document, URL's are used to specify where to get something by ftp, like
this: "ftp://foo.bar.edu/pub/blah/".

The URL's in this document are surrounded by angle brackets "<>".  If you're
lucky (depends on the software you're using to read this FAQ), you may be
able to "follow" these references automatically by clicking on them.  If you
can't, here's how to read and use them:

The part before the colon ("ftp" in this example) is the service type.  Some
common service types are "ftp," "telnet," "gopher," and "http" (which is
Hypertext Transfer Protocol, used in the World-Wide Web). The part between
the "//" and the next slash is the name of the host you should connect to,
sometimes with a specific port specified.  For example,
"telnet://foo.bar.edu:1999/" would mean "use the telnet protocol to connect
to foo.bar.edu on (non-standard) port 1999."  Finally, the part after the
host name is the "path" you should follow to your destination, and its use
varies depending on which protocol is involved. If HTTP is the protocol, just
type the whole reference into your World-Wide Web browser (in fact, you can
type *any* URL into a WWW browser, which makes life easy).  If FTP is the
protocol, which is mostly the case in this document, follow this recipe: use
your ftp program to connect to the named host, and log in as "anonymous,"
giving your e-mail address as a password.  (If you are lucky, your ftp
program will take care of the login for you.)  Then, use the cd command to
change to the first directory listed, in this example "pub."  Then cd to the
next directory, in this case "blah."  Continue until you get to the last
part, which is a file name -- switch to binary mode if appropriate (it
usually is), and get the file: "get blah.Z".  If the URL ends in a slash, it
means the file is somewhere in the specified directory: get to the directory
and look around using "dir".

      ******* End of the Mailing List Management Software FAQ *******