Documentation
DATA EXTRACTOR:  V2.2


System Requirements

  • Perl 5
  • Apache

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM
  • After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

xtractor.cgi (optional)

This will take you all of about 5 seconds to configure first lets do xtractor.cgi.  Open up the file and look near the top for the line:

$list = "emails.txt";

Simply point this variable to the path to the flatfile results database.  If you leave it as is then emails.txt will be created in the installation directory and will contain the email addresses you extracted.

cgi-lib.pl (required)

There is only one variable to change here.   Find the line inside of cgi-lib.pl:

$cgi_lib'maxdata = 13107200; # maximum bytes to accept via POST - 2^17=

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

  • Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi and cgi-lib.pl) into a directory you create called "dataextractor" inside cgi-bin/dataextractor/
  • Create a blank text file inside of the installation directory cgi-bin/dataextractor/ called emails.txt and chmod this file to 666 or 777
  • Make a directory inside of your normal webspace (http://www.yourdomain.com/dataextractor) called clickblasters and upload index.html here.  You might want to password protect this directory.