[WEB4LIB] Automating a Directory Listing in a Web Page

[Elizabeth Hamilton]

Dear Michael,

I'm not sure what server you are using or what your technical knowledge and
skills are so I will give a basic overview as an answer to your question.

If your Web server is on a UNIX machine, you could have a Perl script written
that reads the WP file names, places them in a variable and creates links out
of them and saves the list within an HTML page called "index.html." The fact
that they are in the same directory makes that easy.

You could use server side VBScript or other scripting languages with Active
Server Pages (a sort of umbrella scripting standard/structure  that runs on
IIS and uses a variety of languages) and do the same thing if your Web server
is on NT with IIS (Internet Information Server, Microsoft's Web server).

Then, print the output from your browser.

I have never coded this but it is a fairly basic scripting skill that a
competent Perl or Active Server Page script programmer could create for you.
If you are running a UNIX server, the Perl interpreter needs to be running and
the programmer will  need to know how to reference it and your administrator
would make the scripts executable. Your administrator should know both.

If you are running IIS 3 or 4 on NT, the scripting engine (interpreter) for
server side VBScript, JavaScript or Perl (just three of the scripting
languages used by Active Server Pages) will most likely already available.
Again, your administrator will know what needs to be done to make your
programmer's scripts executable.

Hope this helps,

Elizabeth

Michael Sauers wrote:

> Here's what I want to to:
>
> Directory on a web server with a bunch of WordPerfect file.
> I want to generate an index.html file that would read the directory, print
> the directory listing and automatically hyperlink those filenames to the
> actual WP files.
>
> Has anyone done this before?

--
Elizabeth Hamilton,
Systems Development and Maintenance Analyst
University Libraries, University of Cincinnati
elizabeth.hamilton at uc.edu