I may be making a fool of myself asking this question, but I can't find anything anywhere to say if my freeserve account can use cgi-scripting.

I just want to add a simple script to format and send email from a form input.

If it does support cgi, can the script be in any directory, or does it have to live in a specific cgi-bin??

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Rik.

*If* they support CGI (I doubt it, I'll explain why below) then yes, the script will need to be in a ScriptAliased directory and you probably wont have write access to that directory. They might have something like "Options +ExecCGI" for user directories though, in that case you could use it. You could test it, but you'd need to know the path to perl (you could have a few guesses at /bin/perl, /usr/bin/perl, /usr/local/bin/perl etc). The reason you might not have that ability is because once you have the option of running scripts on the server there's nothing to stop that script reading the contents of say, a password or shadow file, finger output, mass mailing from their boxes, the list is endless, so for security reasons they would probably deny it.

Fear not though, although you can't use your own scripts they do provide some for customer use, have a look at

Thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail, Steve.

I think you're right. The security issue will be upmost. http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/rolleyes.gif

I've got to organise corporate hosting anyway, and I know that allows CGI/Perl. It was just whilst I was playing about developing stuff. http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/wink.gif

That HTML resource seems to hold exactly what I'm after. http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/eek.gif

Cheers! http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/biggrin.gif

[This message has been edited by Squizz (edited 27 September 2001).]