Web Servers

A Dynamic Web Page

Log into your web server, and go to the "appropriate" directory for placing your dynamic HTML pages. Your webmaster can give you this information. For this class we will be using the server named "frankenlinux", and your dynamic HTML directory is /home/yourusername/web-public/cgi-bin.

Once within this directory, create the following file, and name it helloworld.pl .

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "\n";
print "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN\">\n";
print "<HTML><HEAD>";
print "<TITLE>Hello World</TITLE>\n";
print "</HEAD><BODY>\n";
print "<H1>Hello World</H1>\n";
print "Hello world, from a <EM> simple </EM> text file with imbedded HTML formatting.\n";
print "<HR>\n";
print "</BODY></HTML>\n";

Once you have saved this file, use the unix command chmod 755 helloworld.pl to give the script execute permission.

Test the script by running it manually with the command ./helloworld.pl.

Note that it produces nearly identical output to that contained by your static web page you previously constructed.

The only additional information is the "content type" indicator. Our static HTML example did not need to contain this information, as the web server was able to implicitly understand the type via the ".html" extension we put on the file.

Once you have tested this file, return to your client system and bring up your web browser. Enter the URL appropriate for the file you created, in our case it will be http://frankenlinux/cgi-bin/YourUserName/helloworld.pl

You should see your page displayed.

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