Documentation
XTRACTOR PRO

System Requirements

  • Perl 5
  • Sendmail
  • Unix recommended

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

configure.cgi

This file pretty much runs the whole show.  If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly.   In other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY.  Ask your administrator if you need to.  Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi scripts.  All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain things are. 

  • $delay=1;
  • $sendmailpm = "/full/path/to/cgi-bin/xtractorpro";
  • $smtpserver = "yoursmtpserver.com";
  • $mailprogram = '/path/to/sendmail';
  • $sleepinterval = "0"; #(optional)
  • $adminemail = "reply\@mydomain.com";
  • $cgiurlroot = "http://www.yourdomains.com/cgi-bin/xtractorpro"
  • $listdirectory = "/full/path/to/cgi-bin/xtractorpro/lists";
  • $cgidirectory= "/full/path/to/cgi-bin/xtractorpro";
  • $delay is an OPTIONAL variable (its the number of seconds between emails).  So set to zero if you want to blast away.   Otherwise set to 1 or 2 to avoid crashing your computer with sending to huge lists.
  • $sendmailpm is the FULL PATH to the installation
  • $smptserver is the domain name of the OUTGOING mail sender
  • $mailprogram is the full path to sendmail
  • $sleepinterval (this is optional).   Set this to  value (in seconds) between emails in case you don't want to crank up your CPU
  • $adminemail is the email address bounces will be sent to.  You can use this to add to the remove fiel
  • $cgiurlroot is the URL to the installation of xtractorpro
  • $listdiretory is the full path to the "lists" directory which is usally stored inside the cgi-bin/xtractorpro/lists
  • $cgdirectory is the full path to the installation directory of xtractorpr

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

  • Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into a directory you create called "xtractorpro" inside cgi-bin/xtractorpro/
  • Make a directory inside of your /cgi-bin/xtractorpro folder called lists and chmod this directory to 666 or 777
  • I would recommend password protecting this folder /cgi-bin/xtractorpro/ with .htaccess

Chmod the files

  • Chmod all the .cgi files to 755.  Chmod everything else to 666 or 777 (list.txt and the lists directory)

Using The Program

  • To start using the system simply go to http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi.  This prints out the main interface page