EPIC Web Utilities -- AnyURL CGI forms utility

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AnyURL is a CGI form processing program which provides a trivial way for HTML authors to use CGI forms input to point to URL's without doing any programming.

This avoids the need to write a different program for each form (or group of forms), while still being flexible enough to point to URL's containing different access methods, nodes, and object types.

Here's a trivial example - a SELECT to choose a URL from a list.

ftp://ftp.pmel.noaa.gov/OCRD/webutil/AnyURL/AnyURL.txt http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/ http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/toga-tao/gif/daily/sst_wind_anom_5day.gif http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/toga-tao/mpeg/TAO_TOPEX.mpeg

(Of course, the menu labels can be meaningful text instead of the URL's.)

For more examples, see:

• AnyURL-examples
• AnyURL FRAMES example
• Use of AnyURL at other sites

For more complete documentation, refer to AnyURL.txt.

You can fetch AnyURL via ftp (This link will download AnyURL).

The current (Sep 30 1996) version of AnyURL is 1.5, adding:

• Better handling of bad web execution context
• Easily-provided binaries are now available in 'bin' sub-directory
  • OSF/1 V3.0 on Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha processor
  • Solaris (SunOS 5.5) on sun4d (SPARCserver-1000)

Version 1.4 added:

• Version number reporting in AnyURL error output
• -DNOCONTENT compile-time flag to suppress the Content-type header

Version 1.3 added:

• Support for METHOD=GET forms
  • as a work-around for a bug in the AOL, Spry, and possibly other browsers of the time
• A debug=show option (less output than debug=on)
• Inclusion of the documentation URL in error output (for example, opening http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao-bin/AnyURL will point you to the documentation)

Note: To extract the files from the tar archive, use:

which will create and populate a sub-directory named AnyURL.

Then you can compile and test AnyURL for your system:

The AnyURL executable must then be copied to a web script directory (such as /cgi-bin/). Remember to 'chmod a+x AnyURL' in the web script directory.

Note: For SunOS (4.1.3), you should use the ANSI C compiler:

To try out AnyURL, you can point to it on our web server, but if any of your "live" web pages use it, you should probably download it onto your system (so that accesses from your pages don't hit our web server: faster for you, less unecessary web serving for us).

If you do use AnyURL, we'd like to hear about it. Please send mail to epic@noaa.gov.