Shell Programming and Scripting

Pretend you have a web form, and that the clients have downloaded it and filled it in. Now what you will be receiving from them is the POST action from that form. If it helps, actually code up a real form and play around with it; but the clients will not need the actual form, they just need to know how to submit the final POST query.

I get this so far. But how can I submit the final post query without the submit button.

And how will my CGI script deal with multiple client connections?

Regards,
garric

The server takes care of any concurrency issues. And the POST query can basically be submitted by a telnet to port 80 of the server, there is no HTML involved any longer at this point.

It should be revealing to create a simple form with a POST action to http://localhost:4343/ and submit it from your browser, while running netcat -l -p 4343 on the same computer. Now imagine you create a simple client which just submits the same bytes and then disconnects. No browser, no HTML, no form, just a TCP connection to port 80 (or 4343, or where-ever).

I understand what you are trying to explain..

I will give you an example of how my client code shud look like.. Let me know if this is what you were trying to tell

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;
if (@ARGV < 1) { print "usage: perl send_to_server.pl [host]\n"; exit; }
$host = $ARGV[0];
$var = IO::Socket::INET->new( PeerAddr=>"$host",
PeerPort=>"80",
Proto=>"tcp") || die "Connection failed.";
print $var "POST /cgi-bin/server_code.pl?data=abc";

Yes, that's exactly the idea (although that's not really a valid HTTP transaction, nor a useful POST -- but if a GET form is good enough for you, then by all means use that).

A valid GET would be

Code:

print $var "GET /cgi-bin/server_code.pl?data=abc HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n";

Another thing came to mind. What if your clients would simply send an email; would that work? That would leave even less for you to reinvent.

Thats looks like an interesting idea But I will finish working on the one you helped me so much, first.

So if my client code is this simple, will my server code just look like this

$client_data=param(data);
open a file
print $client_data
close a file

My concern now is to handle the concurrent writes into a common area. How do I tackle that?

Regards,
garric

A few possible strategies:This problem is the reason I came up with the email idea, actually (-: