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Programs for facilitating CGI programs in teaching
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© Mike Smith
M.A.Smith at brighton dot ac dot uk
University of Brighton UK.
The following has security implications
System programming
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I have found the following CGI scripts useful in teaching
Running a CGI script
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The following is a CGI script which will run a user's CGI script from
their own home directory ~user/public_html/cgi-bin.
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.
The program mas_run.cpp with
(
mas_cvo.cpp,
parse.h,
parse.cpp,
t99_type.h
)
implements this action.
(
For example:
if this compiled program is put in the cgi-bin directory then a
user user can put their own CGI script into
~user/public_html/cgi-bin.
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>
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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 staff/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.
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.
System programming
Running of a CGI script