[Home page]

[Basic HTML]

[Forms]

[CGI scripts]

[New HTML]

[System]

Contents

System programming Running of a CGI script

System programming

Running a CGI script

This was created to allow students to run their own CGI scripts without having to write into the system cgi-bin directory. There are however security implications in allowing this on your machine.

The main benefits of using this approach are:

• Students do not need to write into the system cgi-bin directory.
• A time limit can be set for running the program.
  As a CGI script runs by default as nobody the system manager must intervene to kill the program.

To run their CGI program they use a normal anchor tag as follows:

<A HREF="http://machine/cgi-bin/mas_run? user=mas&file=cgi&options=op1"> Run my CGI script </A>

The extra components are:

• user=mas
  Identifies the user, in this case mas.
• file=cgi
  Identifies the file to be run, in this case cgi who's full path name is ~mas/public_html/cgi-bin.
• options=op1
  Identifies any options that are to be sent to the CGI program. These can be decoded by using the class parse.
  • In C++ this is implemented as parse.h, parse.cpp.
  • In Ada 95 this is implemented as cgi_pars.ada.

This CGI program is run as normal except that there is an execution limit of 20 seconds on the program.

Try out this program here.