Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#72 Processing Contact Forms

While sophisticated CGI programming is almost always done in either Perl or C, simple tasks can often be accomplished with a shell script. There are some security issues of which you should be conscious, because it's rather easy to inadvertently pass a dangerous parameter (for example, an email address that a user enters) from a form to the shell for evaluation, which a hacker might exploit. However, these potential security holes will likely never arise if your CGI needs are sufficiently modest.

A very common page on a website is a contact request form, which is fed to the server for processing and then emailed to the appropriate party within the organization. Here's the HTML source for a simple form (with a ...