This sounds like a job for SOAP. Also notice the use of the lookup table - instead of allowing the user to send arbitrary commands, only allow them a handlful of tokens that you consider safe: 
package RPC;

sub new {
   my $proto = shift;
   my $class = ref($proto) || $proto;
   my $self  = {
      ls  => 'ls -la'
      top => 'top -b -n1'
      who => 'w'
   };

   return bless $self, $class;
}

sub exec {
   my ($self,$cmd) = @_;
   $cmd = $self{$cmd} || return "bad command\n";
   `$cmd`;
}

[download]
Take a gander at SOAP::Lite for more info, also check out $code or die's review on the module.

Update: I should mention that if you actually want the user to be able to have 'state', then you need to add sessions - check out Apache::Session. For example, if the user issues 'cd /' and then 'pwd' - the result of the 'pwd' will show that they are back at their home directory, and not root.

But, if they need that - then you really should just use ssh. :)

jeffa

In reply to (jeffa) Re: Run arbitrary UNIX commands on webserver without telnet by jeffa
in thread Run arbitrary UNIX commands on webserver without telnet by dmmiller2k

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