EE/CIS User Links Documentation

The user list is automaticly generated once each day by htmlUserList.pl. For each user with a ~/public_html directory, it gives their username, their real name (well, actually the first part of their /etc/passwd gecos field) anchored to their home page, and their user status as it appears in our version of finger.

For users who prefer to keep their web pages elsewhere, the link can be customized by putting the desired url in the file ~/public_html/.homepage_redirect.

htmlUserList.pl parses this file by checking each line against the perl 4 regular expression:

^http://[\w\.-]{1,33}(:\d{1,5})?(/[^\">]*)?$ This is a little more general than the url spec, but allows some common usages, and should keep bad files from smashing the rest of the list. The first matching line will used as your personal home page url in the user links page. If none match, it defaults back to pointing at your entire directory. Note the pattern only allows http urls. Anything else either doesn't make sense, or can be done with symbolic links.

You can test your file, and see what will be used, by running the script with the -testurl flag.

/usb/www/support/htmlUserList.pl -testurl Remember, it doesn't check to see if whatever the urls point at actually exists, just whether they match the pattern.

There's two reasons for this format. It allows "comments". More importantly, it aides users in debuging their urls. htmlUserList.pl -testurl just says "valid" or not. It doesn't give any reason why. This allows a list of several possibilities, to see which ones were accepted.

Allowing more complex custom entries, including html, was considered. However, it was too obnoxious to ensure that "odd" files wouldn't smash the remainder of the user list.

The user status field is derived using finger's algorithm. First it tries to read one line from the user's ~/.userstatus file. If that file doesn't exist, or isn't readable, then it's taken from the userstatus.byname yp map. If there's no entry in there, a default is selected by the uid range. The field is filtered to escape any html markup characters in it.

staff@eecis.udel.edu