automateing adding of acounts

journy101

Ive set up a web swerver and ftp server, with php. I have this question

say I make a simple form for users to sign up for an acount, my php process the submited form data. Normaly I would have to go to my administration page to add a web site and user acount, but instead want the php to automate the process. In my FTP directory I found a file users.pro that containes the acount information for all users, I also noticed the password in plain text. My idea was to write a php script that writes raw data to the file, in the formate used internaly by the ftp server. But would this be a mater of trial and error or would there likely be a easyer method.

Im looking for some guidence. I could easily wite a php script now with little or no dificulties, and I could just as easy learn how to work with SSL and encription but, normaly how would one go abouts doing this. Is it just a mater of knowing the internal workings of your server?

Mordecai

Well, assuming you have access to the file (users.pro) from your http directory, it'll be easy. Simply add the text in the exact same format as it is, just substitute variables in where information should go.

You can use fopen() to open the file and write. It won't harm any of the data there if you only open it for writing (make sure you're not going to truncate the filelength to zero when opening!).
Fputs() or fwrite() can write to the file whatever information you need it to.

journy101

Thank you for your reply.

I learned how I can make the FTP directory accessable to my document root. I opened the users.pro file with a hex editor and the format it uses is simple enough, im sure I could make a php that will be able to open the file, formate the user information provided from the form and write it to the file.

Is this what you would normaly do? for this site phpbuilder there is a user sign up form im guessing the admin would have had to go through this process of locateing the user information file and learning its format, but would thios be typical or would comercial servers have a built in feature for this?