Re: octave script in cgi-bin

[Mike Miller]

On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 10-Oct-1999, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | Also, are there security issues with doing this?  It looks pretty safe
> | to me, but I'd appreciate any suggestions.
> 
> Are users allowed to execute arbitrary Octave commands?  If so, it is
> probably not secure.


No.  They are only allowed to execute the script, and the script accepts
no command-line arguments.

Haven't other people done this?  Let me know, if you get a chance.  It's
Sunday night, so I'm not expecting a lot of quick answers!

Here's another example:


#!/usr/local/bin/octave -qf
disp(['\n'])
format bank; disp(randn(100,6)*chol(.5*ones(6)+.5*eye(6)))


execute it by going here:

http://taxa.psyc.missouri.edu/cgi-bin/makerand2


It produces 100 independently distributed row vectors of length 6
according to a multivariate-normal distribution with unit variances, means
of zero and all pairs of variables (columns of the data) correlated .5.

All I had to do was put the script in my apache/cgi-bin/ directory, and it
worked.  I plan to use this in teaching.

Regards,

Mike



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