Hello,
I have set up a little server box for a class that I'm attending to enable students to share certain works/ideas that they have done, and I only need one more little thing before I want to release it's address to the class. I would like for these students to be able to create their accounts through a web-based form that's hosted on the box by Apache. In other works, when they go to http://theserverbox/adduser.php/html/whatever, they are greeted with a form in which they fill out and it executes "adduser" with the information for the form.

I know that I'd have to give Apache sudo permissions on adduser, chmod, and whatever other programs the script uses, but that's as for as I can get. I figured PHP or Perl would be the best way to encode this. PHP is preferred. The problem is that I know nothing about PHP, and am having a hard time figuring out how to go about this.

Can someone help me with this? Or if this already exists, could you please point me in the right direction (I DID search for this, so I'm not trying to just cut to the chase, here).

Oh, and I'm aware of the fact that this probably holds certain security issues and what not, but since it's only going to be accessible to the class through the school's LAN, I'm not too worried about problems...;-).

Thanks,
Jesse

maybe exec would help.. i dont know if there is a more preferred way or not..
http://us2.php.net/exec

idea..
to restrict access to only your students you could have php check against a database with student ids.. and maybe have them verified with their birthdate or something.. you could create such a db with just information from the students in the applicable classes.. then just update the db every semester (or whenever).. this will also keep old students from getting access after they should be gone..

that way you could keep anyone from getting themselves into trouble and potentially causing you headaches..

Actually, you'd only need to give Apache sudo to run your wrapper script, which would then run other utils as needed.