Knowing that the board member they were sending to open the site was the sort who considered computers paperweights, we decided to reduce the 'opening' to one click. We used the boss's mac to avoid explaining which mouse button to use. Then I set the 'home' page to blank, loaded the blank page, and set the home page back to the site and maneuvered the mouse so the pointer appeared over the home button.

He still managed to tap the mouse a few times until my boss mercifully pushed his finger on to the button. It was worth all my seconds of work as the confusion on his face was replaced with carefully crafted photo-op joy at the marvels of technology.

Here's a few unsolicited comments. Perfect start with -w and strict. You then get CGI.pm to import a whole lot of functions into your namespace (via the qw/:standard/) but don't actually use any of them as you proceed to use the object oriented interface. Does not really hurt but suggest you don't quite understand what happens when you do this. Other than that quibble your indentation could use a little work, how about:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use CGI;
use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/;
my $q = CGI->new();
if ( $q->param('pass') eq "securityrisk" ){
    rename ("index.html", "old.html")     || die "Can't rename: $!";
    rename ("indexalt.htm", "index.html") || die "Can't rename: $!";
    print $q->header( -target   => 'ResultWindow',
                      -nhp      => 1,
                      -expires  => 'now',
                      -location => 'http://www.thenewest.org/'
                     );
}
[download]

All in all a good solid piece of code.

cheers

tachyon

Update

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

Two points not covered by tachyon:

1. In rename ("index.html", "old.html") for example, it would be better to use absolute paths. Otherwise the current directory comes into it and it may not be what you expect.
2. Is '...,-nhp=>1, ...' a typo for -nph=1 ?

After Compline,
Zaxo

Why rename the launch page? Why not just overwrite it? Also, a CGI::Carp error would not look very pretty at a launch if they had mistyped!

Of course, if you knew the IP of the machine doing the launch (and assuming the script is in the same directory as the home page, the home page is in the web root dir and you're on *nix) you could have just done:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# where XXX etc replaced by machine's IP
if ($ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'} eq 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX') {
  system('mv','-f','indexalt.htm','index.htm');
}
print "Location: /\n\n";
exit(0);
[download]

So, if the IP is wrong, they just get the 'password' page again.

.02

cLive ;-)

As long as both arguments are of the same type (file=>file or directory=>directory) and you're on a real OS then rename should overwrite any existing target file. So you could have just done:

rename( "indexalt.html" => "index.html" ) 
  or warn "Couldn't rename: $!";";
[download]

This is just to share my experience in doing something like this. It was actually to shut down the website ... there was a party (go figure) to bring the site down. The 'committee' decided that the best way would be at a certain time I will bring the site down by sshing to the webserver and running a script that replaces the main page with a 'down' page. But since the webserver was modperl i also had to restart the servers. In the meantime the entire staff were doing refreshes to see when the 'down' page came up. I had to tell everyone to stop that 'cos the live connections were causing the apache server to not shut down until the connections died ...

Hope the story at least brought some fun into your lives.

use CGI qw/:standard/;
[download]

my $q = CGI->new();
[download]

I'm not sure where you got that idea but it was just a widget to let the client rename the index file so that the site went live at his command as opposed to me FTPing or SSHing in for him to go live. Client was very amused BTW, not that it earned me a bonus ;}
jg
_____________________________________________________
Ain't no time to hate! Barely time to wait! ~RH