New York University

A private university in the public service.

MIRROR of http://cs.nyu.edu/index.html, from Mark Mareksky who teach a html/unix course at SCE

NYU Web ACF5 Web Pages

You have reached the WWW server that serves as a test bed for those acf5 classes learning about HTML.

For those visiting to look at the personal home pages on this machine, you can find homepages only if you know the person's acf5 username. Use these instructions to find the home page you're looking for.

If you have an account on the acf5 machine and you want to create your home page, use these instructions to set up your template page.

Finally, if you have an account on the acf5 machine and have created your template page, and are interested in setting up some cgi scripts in your account, use these instructions to learn more about how to do that.

Finding a web page on acf5

To see a personal page, use a URL in the following format
http://acf5.nyu.edu/~username
where username is the System Username of the person who has a personal web page.

Creating your web pages on acf5

To create a personal web page, do the following

Login to your home directory
and then, at your system prompt (represented by the percentage symbols below) type the following commands, in order, and exactly as written:

% mkdir public_html
% chmod 755 public_html
% cd public_html
% cp /usr/skel/index.html .
% chmod 644 index.html

Now you will have a template web page. Edit it to your liking.

Using CGI on acf5

ACF5 allows its users to do cgi through their accounts using cgiwrap. To read more about cgiwrap, type
man cgiwrap at the acf5 prompt.

Setting up the Directory

To set up your acf5 account for cgiwrap, create a subdirectory called cgi-bin within your public_html directory. Do this by navigating to your public_html directory and then typing
mkdir cgi-bin at the acf5 prompt. You will place all your scripts in that cgi-bin subdirectory.

Make sure that the public_html and cgi-bin directories have the correct permissions set for them. [See the Permissions Tutorial for more information.] They need to be executable, so navigate back to your home directory and type
chmod 755 public_html to make your public_html directory executable. Then navigate to your public_html directory and type
chmod 755 cgi-bin
to make the cgi-bin directory executable.

Also remember that the scripts themselves need to be set as executable so you'll need to type
chmod 755 filename (where filename is the name of your script) on each of your scripts so that they'll function properly.

Calling the scripts from your HTML

Using cgiwrap, this is how your scripts must be called in the ACTION tag:
http://server:port/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/USERID/SCRIPTNAME
which, in the case of acf5, would be
http://acf5.nyu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/USERID/SCRIPTNAME
(where USERID is your acf5 username and SCRIPTNAME is the particular script's name).

Finally, you should check the syntax of your script by typing
perl -c scriptname
at the prompt. This will list any errors in the command line.

For more information

NYU Webguide: has an FAQ and a Tutorials section.
Mark Meretzky's Home Page: This NYU Professor has more in-depth information on his home page regarding doing HTML and CGI on the acf5 machine.
For questions regarding the acf5 machine write to: comment@acf5.nyu.edu
To check on acf5 service availability: http://www.nyu.edu/acf/status

Good luck!