On Wednesday 03 March 2004 20:34, Mark A. Miller wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Currently, anyone can post to 'linucon-announce' and the others. I > > haven't created 'administrators' as of yet. > > > > There are archives - however, to enable the web system requires knowledge > > I don't have. Mainly it's that the ezmlm cgi stuff is over my head. I > > could probably figure it out, but it's.... strange. I was hoping that > > someone with a lot more cgi experience than I have could look at it and > > give me some instructions. > > What "CGI"? Perl, C, et cetera...?
CGI (common gateway interface) means the server runs a program to generate a web page. Instead of printing out the file at the given URL, it tries to run it as a program (shell script, C executable, whatever), and whatever it prints out when you run it is the resulting page. I.E: --- #!/bin/sh echo "<html>" echo "<body>" echo "Hello world!" echo "</body></html>" --- I did CGI programming for a couple years. The web server sets 8 gazillion environment variables to tell your program about what URL it was called with and what IP the other guy's at and stuff. Try this: #!/bin/sh echo "<html><body><pre>" set echo "</pre></body></html>" to see them all; you can probably figure out which ones you need from that. Also, certain types of form arguments come in on stdin. There's "post" vs "submit", one mangles the URL you're called with (and you have to parse it yourself), and the other feeds you data on standard input that you can just read like it was piped into your program. > And where do I need to look. This is probably all documented somewhere, but the above should get you started. Now if you're dealing with an existing CGI program, it could be a nasty mess written in cobol for all I know. CGI just says what the inputs and outputs are, it doesn't say what language the program is written in... > > Troy Rob
