piping a web browser to a C program running in the shell

expeliarmus · 10-10-2007, 05:15 AM

Hi,
I have a C program which requires 2 inputs,load average and time.I want to create a simple html page which accepts these two inputs in a form,and pipes these values to the C program,running in the shell,so as to make the input part GUI-enabled.
how can I accomplish this?
thanks
expelliarmus

Wim Sturkenboom · 10-10-2007, 06:37 AM

I doubt that the piping can be done but I might be wrong. Some alternatives:

add your own basic webserver to your C application
add a native GUI to your C application
add a very basic server to your C application and use another application to send the input; the latter can be written in a number of scripting languages that have Tk support (I use Tcl/Tk, but I'm quite sure the python and perl also have Tk support)
use expect

I don't have experience with expect, but it would probably be what I would use for this (based on the info that you have supplied).

matthewg42 · 10-10-2007, 06:38 AM

Why would you want to use a pipe to get these values? There are C API calls for both of these - it can all be done from within your program.

theNbomr · 10-10-2007, 09:34 AM

Why can't you simply use CGI? In fact, the underlying mechanism for CGIs using the POST method is exactly as you describe. Your CGI would have to re-issue some sort of HTML page, in order to make the process re-iterate, but simply printing a static page to stdout is pretty simple to do in C.
Building a simple web server into your application is also a quite do-able. It can be accomplished in a few tens of lines, or there are open source mini-http servers out there for embedding.
--- rod.