OpenEuphoria

1. More about Euphoria CGIs (a succesful story!)

• Posted by Daniel Berstein <daber at PAIR.COM> Mar 03, 1999
• 528 views

I tried to execute the EuCGI without binding it. I was unsuccesful :(

Here's the problem:

Xitami recognize as a CGI a file that is located in a valid cgi directory
(it must be configured on the server for security reasons) *and* must
follow one of these criterias:

a) Be a valid exe file (starts with MZ).
b) Start with #! a space and followed by the full path of the interpreter
(used by Perl and Awk scripts).
c) Start with  /*! a space and followed by the full path of the
interpreter, and the last text in the line is */ (used by Rexx scripts).

I made a silly test and put on the first line of my code: #!
c:\euphoria\bin\exw.exe

Half Eureka. The server recognized it as a CGI and spawned exw.exe... with
the obvious error raised by Euphoria:

C:\Xitami\cgi-bin\cgitest.exw:1
hex number not formed correctly
#! c:\euphoria\bin\exw.exe

So here is a new entry to 2.1 beta wish-list:

Rob, please be so kind to just raise a Warning if the very first line of
the code is either a Perl/Awk or Rexx style comment (I asume several other
servers work a similar).

Creating bounded EuCGI is functional, but storage of all those .exe files
may not be desireable. Unregistered (yet) users may start playing with
Euphoria for creating their own CGI's... you know, anything WWWebable is a
commercial success ;) (at least for book publishers).


*Attention*
While writing this email an idea jumped of my mind:

If Xitami reads the first line of a Perl/Awk script to get the interpreter
path, then maybe I oculd fool it. So I created a blank new text document
(with Notepad) and wrote:

#! c:\euphoria\bin\exw.exe c:\xitami\cgi-bin\cgitest.exw

Followed by a blank line.

It worked! Xitami just called exw.exe with the first parameter as my EuCGI
and as second (passed to my script's command line) the location of the
"wrapper" text cgi. From now on I'll use this method for my EuCGI's. In
fact I just moved eucgi.exw from the cgi-bin directory to
c:\eucgi\eucgi.exw and instead put a wrapper file called eucgi (no
extension) that says:

#! c:\euphoria\bin\exw.exe c:\eucgi\eucgi

The only withdraw of this method is that the current working directory is
set where the wrapper is. if you need to get the path of the actual
Euphoria code you could SET a variable on autoxec.bat (EUCGI_DIR?). Rob,
why can't command_line give the path of unbounded files?

Maybe my wish-list contribution should be ommited, but not the idea of
making Euphoria more WWWebable.

I apologize for this long and evolving post, it's one of those emails you
write while coding and testing. Anyways I thought it may be useful to
follow the nature of this "hack".


Regards,
         Daniel  Berstein
         [daber at pair.com]