grumpyoldman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi

I need a look over for a couple of perl scripts I wrote before I release them for general use.

I've wrote a bot/search engine that grabs URLs from bookmark files, spiders them and then puts the content into a seachable index. The script is designed to work as it's own server, not as a cgi program.

Right now I got it working with Mozilla, and Galeon, (should also work with old Netscape), and Opera.

It will be Licensed under the GPL, but it isn't for public use yet. I need to make sure it is reasonably safe for general use before I give it out.

After the base is solid, I'm going to build into the framework a way to get these scripts to hook up with each other in a p2p scheme to share their search results over the web, but that isn't in this script.

The only requirement for the script to work is perl, it is all being done with IO::Sockets and a simple flat file algo because I wanted to keep dependencies low and the results snappy.
Linux/BSD/Mac version:> http://collectivemind.sourceforge.net/bookmark-server-linux.txt

Windows version:
http://collectivemind.sourceforge.net/bookmark-server-windows.txt

The main difference between the two is the fork()ing process I built into the linux version to managed the pid's.

If you are interested, all I am looking for is a look over to make sure the code is relatively safe, my main concern is the use of IO::Sockets and the open port the script requires.

Thanks for your time,
John
grumpyoldman@users.sourceforge.net

  • Comment on Need script review - bookmark bot/simple server/search engine

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Re: Need script review - bookmark bot/simple server/search engine
by grumpyoldman (Novice) on Nov 29, 2002 at 21:29 UTC
    Hi Monks, if the task is too daunting to review these scripts, does anyone have advice on how I should proceed? Should I just start letting people use them and take code improvements as they come in? I've taken the basic precautions as far as I can see, I strip out all the characters that could be hazardous, and the script runs without complaining with -w and strict being used. Any advice would be appreciated.