UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi my name is Jenny.
I'm a very very big beginner with UNIX.

I've made Forms on my website, but need to add CGI to compliment them.

Presently, I don't have a host that supports UNIX.

Is there anywhere I can connect to a UNIX session for free?
If so, will they most likely have the latest version of Perl?

Let me know if I'm not making sense.

I have no idea at all as to where I can start learning about all this CGI/UNIX/Perl stuff.

Does anyone know of any really really basic tutorials? I mean, I'm so "left-in-the-dark" that I don't even know how to log-on or how I'm gonna be able to test my scripts.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this.
Jenny

Hi JennyW
It sounds like you are looking for a web hosting account on a UNIX platform. Unfortunately you are not likely to find a good FREE web hosting solution which allows cgi scripting. Despite this free web hosters usually involve ugly advertising banners be placed on your pages and their reliability and means of maintaining your content are pretty pathetic. Most of them don't involve shell access, which you will need if you want any degree of control over your scripts. I would search for web hosting on the internet, you can get good packages for only $10 a month, which allow cgi, php, perl, sql, etc.

This is a good link to a beginners UNIX tutorial:
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

This is slightly more advanced:
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~patrick/LOCAL/teach/unix/

After this you'll know enough to play around in your filesystem.

Hope this helps.

Regards

for free webhsoting with CGI support you can try http://www.virtualave.net.

HTH