Question

I am trying to call route -n in cgic code but popen returns null. I tried with a simple C code and it works but when i put it in cgi it returns null.

       printf("Content-type: text/html\r\n");
       printf("\r\n"); 
        ....
        ..
        stream = popen("route -n", "r");
        while ( fgets(buffer, 100, stream) != NULL )
        {........}

it doesn’t enter the while loop. I can call “cat” “netstat” etc but route -n doesn’t work.

Answer 1

If I’m looking into my linux box, I see that route is located under /sbin/route and is therefore not part of the $PATH for standard users (while it’s executable for them on my system).

cat and netstat are located under /bin/ and therefore are part of the $PATH.

popen("/sbin/route -n", "r");

will bring up the process.

If this is no option, add /sbin/ to your path and it will also work in your example.