UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Very new to this.....

What I would like to do:

Create a simple GUI/Web portal with 3 buttons and 1 text field

The three buttons need to take the input into the text field and use that as the variable to execute scripts located on a server

Problem:

How can i get the buttons on the page to ssh to the server and kick off the scripts?

I can create the scripts easily enough as they are comprised of simple SQL update statements, but I'm at a loss as to how they would communicate with the portal/gui page (what programming language etc should I be looking into to achieve this?)

Any pointers would help, just really looking for a direction ie this can be achieved by using ______.

Goal:

Instead of having to run these update stmnts from the command line or in workbench etc, the main goal is to have a page I can leave open in the browser at all times and just plug a variable into the text field and select the correct button for what i want it to update.

flow im thinking of click button > ssh to correct server > kick off shell script with the update SQL using the variable provided

Is this possible/efficient? Or is there an easier way?

---------- Post updated at 11:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:42 PM ----------

should have started searching old topics in the forum before posting, pretty confident ill be able to find something after checking a few of these topics

but if any has any feedback please feel free to post

look at php ...

This is the basic functionality of "CGI". CGI - Common Gateway Interface is a way to interface logic - scripts - with the webservers operation, so that whenever some event happens (like when a button is clicked, etc.) a certain script starts to run.

This is quite possible, but depending on how "public" this should be you will have to take various amounts of security precautions. If you simply add the text of your "variable" to a fixed statement and execute this it is possible to add a text which in fact comprises a complete SQL-statement and hence changes the intent of your original statement to something entirely different. This is called "SQL injection" and is one of the biggest issues in Web Development when dealing with user-provided values.

Now, if the three-button interface is just for your personal use you can of course skip any security means, like pre-parsing the user-provided part, etc.. But as the audience using this grows so does the risk of somebody not being as benevolent as you and the necessity of taking precautions increases.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Thanks all for the starting point

Didn't give security much of a thought! It will be for personal use initially. My eventual intention was to open the tool to everyone, but looks like that will be much further down the line