Hi everyone

I am currently getting to learn HTML and would like to construct a site on my Apache server 2.0. Recently I have run through a problem of getting the web page showing whatever content of a specific file on user's hard drive (e.g /etc/passwd). In Windows, everything would be easy for example if i wanna see the content of a file name txt.txt on drive C I just feed in the tag <a href="c:\txt.txt"> but with Linux it doesn't work that way. I have tried many ways but only got it works when i type in the browser the full path of my index file on the server (saying /var/www/html/index.html) and the tag would be <a href="/etc/passwd"> or using relative path <a href="../../../etc/passwd">. However when i use localhost to call my homepage, the link seems not to work anymore.

What should I do to get the link works when I type in localhost in the address bar?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanx

When you "use localhost" I assume you are accessing it through a webserver. The webserver will only have limited access to the filesystem as defined in its configuration.

If you access the files directly from your hard drive then you can access any file that your user has access to. If you are trying to link between the 2 then use "file:///path/to/file" for local files.

Hi David

Thanks for your reply. I did try file:///etc/passwd but no result. The link doesn't work eventhough it appears to be a hyperlink there. The page staystillls when I click on the link....

Any thoughts?

Cheers

What browser are you using?

What are the permissions on the file:
ls -l /etc/passwd

Hi

I am using Firefox and permission of the /etc/passwd file is -rw-r--r--

Hope that it helps

I have finally figured out a way to display a content of a txt file from local hard drive to webpage. I use a php fopen() script. I worked out perfect as I now can see the content of /etc/passwd with ease.

Just posting the solution here so anyone can have a look

Cheers

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One way to to access files on your system is to create links to them within the hierarchy that your web server is set up to access. In *nix, links are made using the ln command. Symbolic or soft links are most likely what you'd be interested in. You can link to either files or directories. You can also move the links about without any penalty. It's pretty handy if you use partitions or separate drives to organize a lot information; you can then include the entire partition under a top level link.

Basically, it's another way of getting around the limitations imposed by the configuration of your web server, which can access files only contained within its defined server_root. You can also change the configuration, but that's more advanced. You should be aware of links.

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