AW: CGI-BIN Help/Advise - editing a file - HOW ?

newbie01 perl <[email protected]> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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