Why don't you perfom some kind of request in your CGI which creates a text file somewhere in f.e. /tmp if a certain condition returns true. Then you let root or Administrator run a task every minute to check if this file exists. If so, root / Administrator can restart you Apache Server.

You also might want to include " if ($^O eq Win32) {...} elsif ($^O eq Linux) {...}

Marcel

I was just thinking if one can't create an Apache module to control the service/daemon ? I know this is a funny way of doing it, but it will allow Apache to selfrestart upon request either via web or internaly calling a function... It's just a tought. I've been using Sudo in other scripts... on top of everything this is one user machine - ie the user is root, and the machine is running Intranet, which means - no Internet access is provided to the computer, which solves the security issues.

This is especailly scary since whatever your script is, it has to run as root/admin to start the web server. Tread softly.

I second pileofrogs's comment.

Update: I forgot the "cross platform" requirement. I don't believe any of the following applies to Windows systems.

On Linux the kernel will not run scripts started with the first line "#! ..." setuid. I refer you to google: linux run script setuid

You could write a program and compile it to an executable file then make the executable setuid. Of course anyone who can execute that program can restart apache.

You could try using the "sudo" command. man.sudo(8). The idea is you can say that whatever user apache runs as is allowed to run the command "/path/to/apachectl restart" as another user (like root) without specifying a password.

Now suppose there is a CGI that updates the apache config files. Further suppose that one time this introduces an error in the configs. Now when the CGI to restart apache is run apache might not restart. I don't know what you are doing. This is just a thought brought on by experience. Think about what could go wrong with a system before building it.

If you're talking a dev machine, a cron job/some scheduled event in windows that will stop/start it if a certain file exists works fine for us here.

Win32 (Windows XP) and Linux (Gentoo i386 platform) I was thinking of using an external script to do that but I thought that there is a better way to do it via mod_perl.