Program 6:

a) Write a Perl program to accept the User Name and display a greeting message randomly chosen from a list of 4 greeting messages.

b) Write a Perl program to keep track of the number of visitors visitingthe web page and to display this count of visitors, with proper headings.

Tags used:

 open() - opens a file if existing otherwise creates a new one. 
 '<filename' is opened for input 
 '<filename' is opened for output starting at the beginning of the file

Code:

6a.html

 <html>
      <!-- path to perl file -->
      <form action="http://localhost/cgi-bin/6a.pl">
           <center>
                <!-- input -->
                <h2>Enter your name:</h2>
                <input type=text name=name />
                <input type=submit value=submit />
           </center>
      </form>
 </html>

6a.pl

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 #load CGI standard routines
 use CGI':standard';
 #take input and store in local variable
 $cmd=param('name');
 #define various greeting messages
 @greet=("Hello","Hai","Nice meeting you","Have a nice day");
 #choose a message based on the length of the input
 $index=int rand scalar @greet;
 print<<here;
 Content-type:text/html\n\n
 <html>
     <center>
          <h2>$cmd, $greet[$index]</h2>
     </center>
 </html>
 here

Output:

Steps for checking output-

  • Save the .html file in the folder /var/www/html
  • Save the .pl files in the folder /var/www/cgi-bin
  • Change the file permission of the perl file by running the command sudo chmod 777 6a.pl
  • Open a browser and in the address bar type localhost/html/6a.html
  • Enter input to view the greeting message.

Screenshots:

output_1

output_2

output_3

output_4

Code:

6b.html

 <html>
      <form action="http://localhost/cgi-bin/6b.pl">
           <center>
                <input type=submit value=Show_no_of_views />
           </center>
      </form>
 </html>

6b.pl

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 #load CGI standard routines
 use CGI':standard';
 print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
 #open a file called count.txt to store values of number of views
 open(FILE,'<count.txt');
 #contents of file are copied to the variable
 $count=<FILE>;
 close(FILE);
 $count++;
 #append the new incremented value to the beginning of the file
 open(FILE,'>count.txt');
 print FILE "$count";
 print "This page has been viewed $count times";

Output:

Steps for checking output-

  • Save the .html file in the folder /var/www/html
  • Save the .pl files in the folder /var/www/cgi-bin
  • Change the file permission of the perl file by running the command sudo chmod 777 6b.pl
  • Open a terminal. Change directory by cd /var/www/cgi-bin and then run the command touch count.txt. This initializes an empty file to store page views.
  • Run the command sudo chmod 777 count.txt in order to continuously update the file on every view to the browser page.
  • Open a browser and in the address bar type localhost/html/6b.html
  • By clicking Show_no_of_views, the number of views to the browser page is displayed and on every refresh, the value gets incremented.

Screenshots:

output