makehomeidx

A Perl program to generate a home pages index of all user home pages on a machine.

Description

makehomeidx creates an HTML file (home pages index) containing links to users home pages on the machine makehomeidx is invoked. This program can be executed from cron(1) to automate the adding of user's home pages to a Web server.

makehomeidx scans through a UNIX password file (-passwd option) and checks each user's account if (s)he has defined a home page. makehomeidx does the following for each user:

Check for the existance of a public html directory (-pubhtml option) in the user's home directory.
Check for the existance of one of the following files in the public html directory in the order listed:
- index.html
- home.html
- <user's login name>.html
Check for the existance of a makehomeidx resource file (-idxrc option) in the user's public html directory. The file contains two lines. The first line is the user's name to use in the home page index. The second line is the user's (job) title to appear after the user's name.
If no resource file exists, the user's name as specified in the UNIX password file will be used, and no job title is listed.

The resulting home page index file lists the users with defined home pages sorted by last name.

See Usage for a complete list of options that affect the behavior of makehomeidx.

Usage

makehomeidx is invoked from a Unix shell, with the following syntax:

% makehomeidx [options] outfile

The resulting HTML home pages index file is specified by outfile.

The following options are available to makehomeidx:

-footer filename: Appends the contents of filename to the home pages index (outfile). The file may contain any HTML markup excluding the <HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY> tags.

-header filename: Prepends the contents of filename to the home pages index (outfile). The file may contain any HTML markup excluding the <HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY> tags.

-help: Print out a short help message about makehomeidx.

-hostname string: Use string as the name of the host machine. Otherwise, use the string returned by hostname(1).

-idxrc name: Use name as the filename of individuals makehomeidx resource file. Otherwise, use ".homeidxrc".

-passwd filename: Use filename as the UNIX password file. Otherwise, use "/etc/passwd" instead. If filename is equal to "-", then makehomeidx reads the password file from standard input. This can be useful for password files that are accesible via NIS. Example:

         % ypcat passwd | makehomeidx -passwd - homepages.html

-pubhtml name: Use name as the directory name of user's public html directory. Otherwise, use "public_html".

-title string: Use string for the title of the home pages index (outfile). Otherwise, use "Home Pages".

Any arguments that are not part of the command-line options are treated directories containing e-mail messages.

Notes

The syntax of the URLs used to link to user's home page is as follows:
http://hostname/%7Elogin/homepage
where,
- hostname = machine name
- login = login name of user
- homepage = name of home page of user
The URLs work for the NCSA http daemon. makehomeidx has only been tested with the NCSA httpd. The author is not sure if the URLs will work for other http daemons.
The UNIX passwd file is assumed to be a BSD style password file in determining a user's real-life name. If no makehomeidx resource file exists and no real-life name is defined in the password file, then the user's login name is used.
makehomeidx requires the use of newgetopt.pl.

Earl Hood, ehood@convex.com

makehomeidx 1.0.1