raw wound pie

Anon

i am trying to create a page that executes a linux command every X seconds and prints the command output to an html page. i think dont think it will take much code, and i think i have an idea of how to do it, but i would like to see some other ideas so i can match my idea up and see if im going to do it right.

basically i think i want to tail XX.xx; and have a timer or something that re executes it automatically every X seconds, and prints the tail, cat or ___ command to the page.

any ideas?

-thanks

[deleted]

If you want to execute it every X minutes, you'll definately need to use the crontab.

Anon

thanks v, any other ideas on how to print the output to the browser?

[deleted]

You can't print to the browser, you'll have to make the browser request the page from the server, just you would request any other page.

Anon

are you talking about a form to submit the request??

what i was hoping was for a page that simulates displaying log messages as they come in, by mabee executing the command every X seconds

[deleted]

Ok, that was not very clear from your first post.

In that case you can make a simple script that reads the 'tail' of the log;

passthru('tail file.log');

and use HTML's META REFRESH to make the page refresh itself every X seconds.
Search the net for an example of meta-refresh.

Anon

the only problem with that is that i want the page to refresh almost a second or two in between, and with meta refresh, it would drive my comp crazy. what i was hoping for was a script that would automatically run the tail command, (mabee a while or for loop) and from there it would be printed to the screen with every execute. i may not be thinking this through very carefully because it may not even be possible, but that is what im hoping for it to do.

Anon

I'm at work, so I can't test this. Plz note that it helps to read the man pages.

W/tail, you just specify a -f flag, and it'll keep the file open and all new input will dump. Therefore, you should be able to just put a system('tail -f /path/the_file/')call in your web page.

Make sure to set_time_limit before exec'ng the tail, or the script will stop.

Hope this helps.

Anon

that sounds really good moth, im going to try it. thanks alot.

[deleted]

If you want that kind of speed, why don't you just open a telnet or ssh session and forget all about PHP and webservers for that bit?

Anon

what im actually trying to do is build a back end for the internet company i work for. the tech support group is supposed to be able to log on to this web page, and view the user logs of people trying to connect to our server. right now, the only thing we can do is telnet to the server and tail -f the log. what we want is to view a web page the reads the log, keeps the file open and prints to the browser as new messages come in without having to hit any buttons at all, or refeshing the whole page like a meta refresh would do. the text can refresh, but i dont want the browser to do that.

i know its possible with java, but i dont know if it is possible with php. unfortunatly i dont know much @!#$ about java, so im hoping that something might do the trick in php.

Anon

I'd suggest that you get a Java book and figure out what you need to do this with an applett. What you are going to end up doing is creating a web connection that never closes, even when the user closes the browser. This is going to start eating up resources that you probably want to use elsewhere. Using a web server for this isn't a good idea.

Anon

you might also want to look at some of the weblog analyzers--you can get some awesome data from these things. i wrote a custom one for my company, and suddenly we know tons of info about our clients.

i researched them all, and webalizer seemed by far the best; however, the company vetoed this in lieu of a custom app. i didn't do any installations, but if you wanted to take the next step, this would be a great choice.

this is a link to an article about it, a link to webalizer itself is contained therein:
http://www.linuxnetmag.com/en/issue3/m3webalizer1.html

[deleted]

Forget that java shite, use a real language like C++ or Delphi.

But, you can just as easily configure a startup script in your telnet app to open the logs right after you login. It is not that hard, saves you a lot of work, and tech support staff are going to require telnet anyway.

You really don't want to have to install this 'viewlog' script on every machine you are hosting. Telnetting or SSHing with a sysadmin account is much much cleaner.