newbie01 perl <newbie01.p...@gmail.com> asked: > At the moment, I have some sort of INI/config file that I edit manually > via vi. These config files are "simple" delimited file that are used by > some of the scripts running on the server. > > I want to be able to the same thing via cgi-bin, can anyone advise where > to start. Basically, I want to be able to display the contents of the > INI/config file in some kind of FORM or web page and then allow the user > to be able to edit and save it at the same time. > > Any advise on where to start will be very much appreciated. Am not sure > if I should be using PHP instead of CGI-BIN but I thought the latter > would be simpler to do. > > Being able to prompt for a username/password prior to editing the file > would be a plus ... :-)
If I may start with the last question: user authorization is usually easiest handled as part of the web server configuration. If you're using Apache, look at the <Location> directive. Also, there's no programming language called CGI-BIN. CGI is a calling convention that defines how the web server invokes external programs to handle calls to certain URLs. Since CGI usually involves starting a new process for the external program it's less effective for either Perl or PHP than using a built-in interpreter in the web server. In PHP the latter is often called using "SAPI" while Perl people talk about using mod_perl. Solving your problem is possible in either language. Since this is a Perl list, we'll stick to using Perl here, though. At this point you'll probably want to look at the CGI module for all of your page rendering and argument parsing needs. Your code flow will likely look something like this: 1) Read config file into memory 2) Apply changes submitted by the user to the in-memory representation 3) Render the in-memory representation to a form where the user can edit values 4) Write out the config file data if it was changed Things to keep in mind are - You might want to do implement some kind of locking to prevent two people from editing your file ant once, since this may lead to "lost updates" (where changes from one user overwrite the changes previously submitted by another user) or worse (a trashed output file). - Pressing the "stop" button in the browser can cause your program to abort in mid-execution. You'll want to make sure that this doesn't happen while handling the update of the output file. HTH, Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-cgi-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-cgi-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
