[Hm. This should probably be a FAQ, under the more general category of "How
do I get a server to send me _____?"]
The answer: GET, same as normal. Or to be more precise, there is no such
thing as either a request for a file or for a directory, only a request for a
"resource". When you send the browser a request, it is at its own liberty to
decide what to send back. Simple servers generally return data corresponding
to some section of the file system, but this need not be the case. Servers
are at their own liberty to decide how to respond. The directory behavior you
saw follows the choice of some servers to return directory contents when a URL
corresponds to a directory in the file system and the directory does not
contain some default HTML file. For instance, our server is configured to
return a directory for http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~mabzug1/ if the directory
didn't contain a file called index.html, but if I touch index.html, it'll
return the file. You can try to get a directory by manipulating the URL in
various ways, but you are not guaranteed success.
-- Mordechai T. Abzug http://umbc.edu/~mabzug1 mabzug1@umbc.edu finger -l mabzug1@gl.umbc.edu God does not play dice. -Albert Einstein