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Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Oct 22, 2017 05:28 PM UTC:I have no experience with Perl either. What do we have that is powered by Perl script?
I have some experience with Perl, and David learned about it from a book I lent him. But I always favored PHP. So I just haven't done much with Perl. There are scripts in /cgi-bin/ with the .cgi or .pl extentions. These are Perl scripts.
To find the pages that include Perl scripts, you can sign into SSH and use grep. Here is some sample output from entering the command grep extern.cgi */*.html >extern1.txt from /home/chessvariants/public_html. This checks through HTML files in first-level subdirectories for the string "extern.cgi". My plan is to check for a given Perl script in all the files of the site, make appropriate changes in each file, and then when all references to a Perl script have been removed to delete the Perl script itself. In some cases, I expect I will have to write a new PHP script to replace the Perl script before I can start changing the references to it in files. With extern.cgi, I have mainly been entering an HTML link to the Zillions of Games page.
Given an ItemID, the extern.cgi script would return an external link to the item in the form of a link to "index/external.php?itemid=ItemID". Instead of writing a new script, I am replacing references to this script with URLs of the form "/link/ItemID". This makes use of the semantic URLs I have already setup for handling links. It will not work with offline pages, but if you could follow external links, you should also be able to use the actual site.
Since the files listed in extern1.txt are now taken care of, here is extern2.txt, a list of second-level files with the string extern.cgi in them.
Except for backups, which I won't bother with, I removed extern.cgi from all *.html files, and I didn't find it in any *.cgi, *.pl, *.php, or *.htm files. I also searched the membersubmissions table, and I didn't find it there. As a precaution against deleting things too early, I moved /cgi-bin/extern.cgi to /cgi-bin/oldcgi/extern.cgi. This is good enough for letting me see what I've done and what I still have to do.
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It looks like Perl scripts are not working, and I'm not sure how to get them to work. For the most part, it may be possible to replace Perl scripts with PHP scripts or in some cases just some HTML. As far as I know, David Howe wrote all the Perl scripts, and he is no longer here maintaining them. So it may be best to just phase them out and rely on PHP scripts instead.