deleting a paticular line of a text file

[Anon]

hi,
im currently creating a php script which i want to allow me to add email accounts to my server on the fly. im not sure how to go about this. If a file is owned by "root", how can i write to it? does it have to be owned by user "nobody"?

Also, i should be able to write to the virtuser file but what about compiling it into the virtuser.db file? how could i execute the command?

One last thing, if i wanted to delete an email address from the file and then re-compile the file again, how could i got to a SPECIFIC email address. so basically a specific line in the virtuser table.

Any help at all would be appreciated

Thanks!
Khilan

[Anon]

Can't you write pending account creations to a temporary file and have root's cron check it every 15 minutes and add the appropriate # of accounts? Or store it in a database. Either way, don't let nobody have root.

Mike

[Anon]

Can't you write pending account creations to a temporary file and have root's cron check it every 15 minutes and add the appropriate # of accounts? Or store it in a database. Either way, don't let nobody have root.

Mike

[Anon]

Very good point!

The sendmail stuff all has to be run by root anyway.
Knowing sendmail, it will probably explode in your face if you let it be owned by anybody else.

Mike hits the nail on the head:
Write some neat php code that writes the required changes to a nice file.
Then use the root's crontab to start a different script that reads this file and does all the work.

Be very carefull about what you enter into your virtusers table though, or you'll be a spam-relay host before you know it. :-)
Indeed, be very carefull about what you write to that file.

[Anon]

Hi

Did you find a solution to this problem? I want to do the same. Any tips?

Andy

[[deleted]]

by 'problem' do you mean removing one line from a textfile or changing the virtusers file?

[Anon]

Hi Vincent

No, my problem is that I want to add a new email address that one of our clients enters into a html form to the virtuser table and I don't know how to. Currently a php script merely adds a record to a mysql table and we update the virtuser table manually. It's this manual intervention I want to avoid.

Andy

[[deleted]]

Well, if you already have the data in a database, what's the problem? 🙂

Surely you can get it to print the file to screen? list the headers plus all the email adress data as you would type it in manually?

[Anon]

Hi Vincent

I want to write to the sendmail virtuser table then update the sendmail virtuser db.

I could write to a file in php but I need root permissions so it seems to me it would be a major security issue to run a php script with root permissions.

I think I need to write a routine in perl that reads the MySQL table, writes a flat file, then (somehow) updates the virtuser db. I then need to run this as a cron job.

What do you think?

Andy