Help on the Cookie Jar Page

# Cookie Jar Page Help

The Cookie Jar Page displays all of the unexpired cookies you have accumulated in the hypothetical Cookie Jar. The cookies are obtained via Set-Cookie MIME headers in replies from http servers, and are used for State Management across successive requests to the servers.

The cookies are listed by domain (server's Fully Qualified Domain Name, or site-identifying portion of the FQDN), and in order of decreasing specificity (number of slash-separated symbolic elements in the path attribute of the cookie). When Lynx sends requests to an http server whose address tail-matches a domain in the Cookie Jar, all its cookies with a path which head-matches the path in the URL for that request are included as a Cookie MIME header. The 'allow' setting for accepting cookies from each domain (always, never, or via prompt) also is indicated in the listing.

The listing also shows the port (normally 80) of the URL for the request which caused the cookie to be sent, and whether the secure flag is set for the cookie, in which case it will be sent only via secure connections (presently, only SSL). The Maximum Gobble Date, i.e., when the cookie is intended to expire, also is indicated. Also, a server may change the expiration date, or cause the cookie to be deleted, in its replies to subsequent requests from Lynx. If the server included any explanatory comments in its Set-Cookie MIME headers, those also are displayed in the listing.

The domain=value pairs, and each cookie's name=value, are links in the listing. Activating a domain=value link will invoke a prompt asking whether all cookies in that domain should be Gobbled (deleted from the Cookie Jar), and/or whether the domain entry should be Gobbled if all of its cookies have been Gobbled, or whether to change the 'allow' setting for that domain. Activating a cookie's name=value link will cause that particular cookie to be Gobbled. You will be prompted for confirmations of deletions, to avoid any accidental Gobbling.