Open URL files
 

Linux browsers won't open and parse a file that contains only the text
[InternetShortcut]URL=http://linuxquestions.org/
to get and render a default file from a web server.

[rant]
They have no problems pushing advanced advertising code.
[/rant]

It's not quite clear what you want to do and how it fails. I am speculating that it's one or more of the below things; can you be a bit more specific?

Double-clicking on a URL file in the GUI? What happens?
Issuing some bash command, but which command? How does this fail?
Searching something on your computer? On the internet? What do you do, and how does it fail?
Modifying URL files from a Windows system perhaps, so that you can use then in the Mint file manager?

so you are using chrome for linux, and it has the capability to save url's as icons/files to your desktop?
and now you need to edit these files?
am i understanding this correctly?

Thanks.

ok, so i was going to ask you: "how did you create these .url files in the first place?"

but your ongoing rant kind of suggests that you come from a proprietary os and now complain that linux does not behave the same way.
whatever.

searching your problem gives many results, and skimming a few, it seems you can make .url files open in your browser rather easily.

this one looked good and recent.

n/m.

.url is a windows thing?

This

appears to be a Windows thing: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx

It's certainly not valid HTML.

^ exactly, it's another of those bs-pseudo-standards created by microsoft, ignoring all real standards.

searching for it yesterday, there was some beautiful rant, but op wanted a (boooring!) solution.
a simple shell script.
the beauty of linux.