asked on

Detect RELOAD in cgi and how to figure out the date?

I want to know if someone is reloading my page(ie, click the
RELOAD button), can I use some variables in cgi to do this?

How to get the date since there is no such environment variable available? please tell me in details. (say currentTime = date(...) or something like that)

And finally, I want to figure out who are currently on
my page, that is, to find out all the users who are currently on my page.(use REMOTE_ADDR can get only one
of them)

Thanks.

Wayne Leister

I have an answer for the second question(date). You need to use the time function(gives you seconds since 1970) then feed that into the localtime function. It returns a list with the date:
($sec, $min, $hour, $mday, $mon, $year, $wday, $yday, $isdst)= localtime(time);
$mday is the day of the month
$mon is the month
$year is the year
$wday is the day of the week

jpk041897

Regarding the first question:

You could set up an invisible applet on your page. Whenever a page is loaded (or reloaded) Java's Applet.start() method is called. You could set up a counter that determines how many times the page has been loade. If > 1, and the time frame is less than say 5 or 10 seconds, the user is refreshing the page.

Re.: question 2, an applet can detect the IP of the user that loaded it, it could transmit this info, via a socket, to a remote server.

Re.: question 3, an applet can also obtain time information and save it on a file on the host.

Of course, you posted this question on the CGI topic section so I don't know if an applet solution is acceptable to you, thus I post as a comment and don't give additional details.

Your CGI code could read a file generated by an applet though, to obtain the info you require so, if no one can produce a better answer and/or a combination applet/CGI solution is acceptable I'd be glad to post an answer with additional details.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

julio011597

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carrot

ASKER

This answer helps a lot, thanks.
but I can't give more points since I have nearly none
left. Think I may want to ask one or more questions. ^.^

Thanks again.