Assistance with your Errors

One of the difficulties in writing perl scripts is that the error messages are pretty cryptic.

However Apache provides more detailed error descriptions in its error log.

Unfortunately everybody's errors are recorded there creating a huge file and you are probably only interested in your own errors.

In this exercise you are going to write a perl program that examines the apache error log and extracts only your errors.

If you are online, try this url CGI Errors

The error log is stored in /var/log/apache2/error.log and you have read access to it.
(If you are not accessing cybil check the permissions and name of the error log on your system)

You should create an html form with just a textbox for your unix logon name and a submit button.

The perl script attached to the form should

• Parse the form and extract your logon name.
• Open the error log file
• Print any lines that contain your name back to the browser, suitably formatted

You may find the following line useful,

if($line=~ /$name/)

The code above shows you how you can test for the occurrence of your name in a line of text and use it as part of an if command. This allows you to filter out only your errors.

It assumes two things
that the variable $name gets your unix logon name from the html form.
that as you read through the text file, apache_error_log, you store each line in a variable called $line.

Now complete the rest of the program.

Enhancement
The error log may contain badly formed html tags that may stop your program from rendering correctly.
Ensure you strip any html tags from the input. (Hint: $value=~ s/<.+?>//g)

---