Why doesn't Alpine's viewer command work within GNU screen and how can I fix it?

Question

When I run the viewer command in alpine from within GNU screen it tells me "viewer command completed" but it doesn't actually bring up Lynx (or any other viewer). I even tried writing my own script that would just write the arguments out to a file and no dice. I tried piping the message to a file, and I get "Can't exec (script) no such file or directory"

However, if I close out alpine, detach from screen, and then start alpine, I can use the viewer or pipe messsages just fine.

So, what is the problem here and how can I fix it?

Update 1:

The value of TERM depends on what I login with - from Eterm on my laptop, TERM is Eterm outside of screen and screen inside. From Connect Bot it's screen attached or not.

And here is my .screenrc

$ cat .screenrc 
defscrollback 10000
caption always "%?%F%{-b bc}%:%{-b bb}%?%C|%D|%M %d|%H%?%F%{+u wb}%? %L=%-Lw%45>%{+b by}%n%f*%t%{-}%+Lw%-0<"

shell bash

bind j focus down
bind k focus up
bind t focus top
bind b focus bottom

screen -t 'system'
screen -t 'alpine'
screen -t 'programming' 
screen -t 'suppliments' 
screen -t 'ssh'
screen -t 'webby'
screen -t 'ipython' ipython
screen -t 'mpg321'
screen -t 'irssi' 

Update 2: Changing the term value didn't fix anything. I tried tmux for a while, and that actually worked, but I had some issues with it properly sizing based on what screen I was using (whatever the smallest dimension was).

So now I'm using a somewhat strange hack - I run a tmux session inside my screen session and run alpine inside that tmux session. Viewing URLs works perfectly fine now, but obviously this is not the ideal situation, and I'd welcome any better fixes.

Answer 1

It looks like you are hard-coding your shell in the .screenrc to bash, is that your login shell as well? Try commenting out that line and trying.

Failing that, compare the value of your $PATH from outside of tmux/screen, from inside screen, and from inside of tmux? If nothing jumps out from there, compare the output of env from all three setups.

Answer 2

I do something similar to what the OP seems to need. I have alpine check to see whether I am using it locally or remotely via screen. If it's remote, I use screen to open a script that calls elinks, and if it's local (i.e. anything else), I use firefox to open the URL.

In .pinerc:

url-viewers=_TEST("test '${TERM}' = screen-bce")_ "/usr/bin/screen screlinks _URL_", "/usr/bin/firefox _URL_"

The script I call "screlinks" checks if there's a running elinks already and if so uses the -remote option to open a new tab.

running='elinks -remote ping()'
if $running
then # echo "elinks running"
  /usr/bin/elinks -remote $@
else # echo "elinks not running"
  /usr/bin/elinks $@
fi

The end result is that when I'm using alpine in screen and I open a URL, I get a new screen process that runs elinks. I can switch there using the appropriate ^A command, and close it when I'm done or leave it open and add extra URLs as tabs.