FTP and CGI scripting

[Stradlin]

Hello everyone-

I'm trying to set up an FTP site to distribute files to clients and consultants. I want to track exactly who is downloading what, and so I've set up a login page for undividual users. And I can write the script that would notify me when someone has downloaded a file. Unfortunately, my FTP knowledge is limited, and I'd like to know whether I have to call the script from an HTML document or whther I can somehow call it automatically every time something is downloaded. What can I use to trigger my logging script from an FTP browser?

Thanks,

mark

 

[Moonbender]

Your first bet would be to check out different FTP servers, there might be programs that already have this function (ie. start another program when someone logs in, downloads something) built-in. That is, if you have control over which FTP server is running.

If that doesn't do it, virtually all servers write a log file, and you could program a script that continuosly reads that log file and act upon it. The log files are usually written in a way that's easily read by a script.

Finally, you might want to use HTTP instead of FTP to distribute the files. HTTP servers support server side scripting, I don't think FTP servers do that in a similar way. At the same time, FTP doesn't really offer great advantages to HTTP in the way of file transfer.