Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#74 Building a Guest Book

A common and popular feature of websites is a guest book, modeled after the book commonly found at bed-and-breakfasts and chic resorts. The concept's simple: Enter your name, email address, and a comment, and it'll be appended to an existing HTML page that shows other guest comments.

To simplify things, the same script that produces the "add your own entry" form and processes new guest entries as they're received will also display the existing guest book entries (saved in a separate text file) at the top of the web page. Because of these three major blocks of functionality, this script is a bit on the long side, but it's well commented, so it should be comprehensible. Ready?

The Code

 #!/bin/sh # guestbook - Displays ...