somewhat OT: http_proxy format (was: tor controller hangs / doesn't reply)

[Drake Wilson]

Quoth Scott Bennett <bennett at cs.niu.edu>, on 2009-06-03 15:22:43 -0500:
> >I can't find a copy of the aforementioned fetch(3) page anywhere on
> >the Web or on any system to which I have access.
> 
>      Try here:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fetch&apropos=0&sektion=3&manpath=FreeBSD+7.2-RELEASE&format=html

Okay.  For some reason I wasn't able to find that with a search for
"fetch(3)", but perhaps I did something wrong.

Anyway, from that exact source:
| EXAMPLES
|     To access a proxy server on proxy.example.com port 8080, set the
|     HTTP_PROXY environment variable in a manner similar to this:
|
|         HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy.example.com:8080

so that doesn't support the thesis of HTTP proxy environment values
not being formatted as URLs.

Unrelatedly, it may be that I was mistaken about the port component
and that it is required.  There's also some confusion regarding the
case of the variable name; some programs check both (including some of
the examples I gave), but the lowercase form seems more common overall
(probably due to name collisions with HTTP_* variables in CGI).

And for the original user, more importantly, I might note that some
programs, such as Lynx, appear to require a separate https_proxy
setting as well.

   ---> Drake Wilson