This file documents the networking features in GNU Awk (gawk) version 3.1 and later.
This is Edition 1.1 of TCP/IP Internetworking With gawk, for the 3.1.4 (or later) version of the GNU implementation of AWK.
Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being “GNU General Public License”, the Front-Cover texts being (a) (see below), and with the Back-Cover Texts being (b) (see below). A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
In May of 1997, Jürgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from awk, and, with a little help from me, set about adding features to do this for gawk. At that time, he wrote the bulk of this web page.
The code and documentation were added to the gawk 3.1 development tree, and languished somewhat until I could finally get down to some serious work on that version of gawk. This finally happened in the middle of 2000.
Meantime, Jürgen wrote an article about the Internet special files and `|&' operator for Linux Journal, and made a networking patch for the production versions of gawk available from his home page. In August of 2000 (for gawk 3.0.6), this patch also made it to the main GNU ftp distribution site.
For release with gawk, I edited Jürgen's prose for English grammar and style, as he is not a native English speaker. I also rearranged the material somewhat for what I felt was a better order of presentation, and (re)wrote some of the introductory material.
The majority of this document and the code are his work, and the high quality and interesting ideas speak for themselves. It is my hope that these features will be of significant value to the awk community.
Arnold Robbins
This chapter provides a (necessarily) brief intoduction to computer networking concepts. For many applications of gawk to TCP/IP networking, we hope that this is enough. For more advanced tasks, you will need deeper background, and it may be necessary to switch to lower-level programming in C or C++.
There are two real-life models for the way computers send messages to each other over a network. While the analogies are not perfect, they are close enough to convey the major concepts. These two models are the phone system (reliable byte-stream communications), and the postal system (best-effort datagrams).
When you make a phone call, the following steps occur:
The same steps occur in a duplex reliable computer networking connection. There is considerably more overhead in setting up the communications, but once it's done, data moves in both directions, reliably, in sequence.
Suppose you mail three different documents to your office on the other side of the country on two different days. Doing so entails the following.
The important characteristics of datagram communications, like those of the postal system are thus:
The price the user pays for the lower overhead of datagram communications is exactly the lower reliability; it is often necessary for user-level protocols that use datagram communications to add their own reliability features on top of the basic communications.
The Internet Protocol Suite (usually referred to as just TCP/IP)1 consists of a number of different protocols at different levels or “layers.” For our purposes, three protocols provide the fundamental communications mechanisms. All other defined protocols are referred to as user-level protocols (e.g., HTTP, used later in this web page).
All other user-level protocols use either TCP or UDP to do their basic communications. Examples are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).
In the postal system, the address on an envelope indicates a physical location, such as a residence or office building. But there may be more than one person at a location; thus you have to further quantify the recipient by putting a person or company name on the envelope.
In the phone system, one phone number may represent an entire company, in which case you need a person's extension number in order to reach that individual directly. Or, when you call a home, you have to say, “May I please speak to ...” before talking to the person directly.
IP networking provides the concept of addressing. An IP address represents a particular computer, but no more. In order to reach the mail service on a system, or the FTP or WWW service on a system, you must have some way to further specify which service you want. In the Internet Protocol suite, this is done with port numbers, which represent the services, much like an extension number used with a phone number.
Port numbers are 16-bit integers. Unix and Unix-like systems reserve ports below 1024 for “well known” services, such as SMTP, FTP, and HTTP. Numbers 1024 and above may be used by any application, although there is no promise made that a particular port number is always available.
Two terms come up repeatedly when discussing networking: client and server. For now, we'll discuss these terms at the connection level, when first establishing connections between two processes on different systems over a network. (Once the connection is established, the higher level, or application level protocols, such as HTTP or FTP, determine who is the client and who is the server. Often, it turns out that the client and server are the same in both roles.)
The server is the system providing the service, such as the web server or email server. It is the host (system) which is connected to in a transaction. For this to work though, the server must be expecting connections. Much as there has to be someone at the office building to answer the phone2, the server process (usually) has to be started first and be waiting for a connection.
The client is the system requesting the service. It is the system initiating the connection in a transaction. (Just as when you pick up the phone to call an office or store.)
In the TCP/IP framework, each end of a connection is represented by a pair of (address, port) pairs. For the duration of the connection, the ports in use at each end are unique, and cannot be used simultaneously by other processes on the same system. (Only after closing a connection can a new one be built up on the same port. This is contrary to the usual behavior of fully developed web servers which have to avoid situations in which they are not reachable. We have to pay this price in order to enjoy the benefits of a simple communication paradigm in gawk.)
Furthermore, once the connection is established, communications are synchronous.3 I.e., each end waits on the other to finish transmitting, before replying. This is much like two people in a phone conversation. While both could talk simultaneously, doing so usually doesn't work too well.
In the case of TCP, the synchronicity is enforced by the protocol when sending data. Data writes block until the data have been received on the other end. For both TCP and UDP, data reads block until there is incoming data waiting to be read. This is summarized in the following table, where an “X” indicates that the given action blocks.
| TCP | X | X
|
| UDP | X |
|
| RAW | X |
|
The awk programming language was originally developed as a pattern-matching language for writing short programs to perform data manipulation tasks. awk's strength is the manipulation of textual data that is stored in files. It was never meant to be used for networking purposes. To exploit its features in a networking context, it's necessary to use an access mode for network connections that resembles the access of files as closely as possible.
awk is also meant to be a prototyping language. It is used to demonstrate feasibility and to play with features and user interfaces. This can be done with file-like handling of network connections. gawk trades the lack of many of the advanced features of the TCP/IP family of protocols for the convenience of simple connection handling. The advanced features are available when programming in C or Perl. In fact, the network programming in this chapter is very similar to what is described in books such as Internet Programming with Python, Advanced Perl Programming, or Web Client Programming with Perl.
However, you can do the programming here without first having to learn object-oriented ideology; underlying languages such as Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python; or all of the libraries necessary to extend these languages before they are ready for the Internet.
This chapter demonstrates how to use the TCP protocol. The other protocols are much less important for most users (UDP) or even untractable (RAW).
The `|&' operator introduced in gawk 3.1 for use in
communicating with a coprocess is described in
Two-way Communications With Another Process (GAWK: Effective AWK Programming).
It shows how to do two-way I/O to a
separate process, sending it data with print or printf and
reading data with getline. If you haven't read it already, you should
detour there to do so.
gawk transparently extends the two-way I/O mechanism to simple networking through the use of special file names. When a “coprocess” that matches the special files we are about to describe is started, gawk creates the appropriate network connection, and then two-way I/O proceeds as usual.
At the C, C++, and Perl level, networking is accomplished via sockets, an Application Programming Interface (API) originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley that is now used almost universally for TCP/IP networking. Socket level programming, while fairly straightforward, requires paying attention to a number of details, as well as using binary data. It is not well-suited for use from a high-level language like awk. The special files provided in gawk hide the details from the programmer, making things much simpler and easier to use.
The special file name for network access is made up of several fields, all of which are mandatory:
/inet/protocol/localport/hostname/remoteport
The /inet/ field is, of course, constant when accessing the network. The localport and remoteport fields do not have a meaning when used with /inet/raw because “ports” only apply to TCP and UDP. So, when using /inet/raw, the port fields always have to be `0'.
This section explains the meaning of all the other fields, as well as the range of values and the defaults. All of the fields are mandatory. To let the system pick a value, or if the field doesn't apply to the protocol, specify it as `0':
Experts in network programming will notice that the usual client/server asymmetry found at the level of the socket API is not visible here. This is for the sake of simplicity of the high-level concept. If this asymmetry is necessary for your application, use another language. For gawk, it is more important to enable users to write a client program with a minimum of code. What happens when first accessing a network connection is seen in the following pseudocode:
if ((name of remote host given) && (other side accepts connection)) {
rendez-vous successful; transmit with getline or print
} else {
if ((other side did not accept) && (localport == 0))
exit unsuccessful
if (TCP) {
set up a server accepting connections
this means waiting for the client on the other side to connect
} else
ready
}
The exact behavior of this algorithm depends on the values of the fields of the special file name. When in doubt, table-inet-components gives you the combinations of values and their meaning. If this table is too complicated, focus on the three lines printed in bold. All the examples in Networking With gawk, use only the patterns printed in bold letters.
| protocol | local port | host name | remote port | Resulting connection-level behavior
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tcp | 0 | x | x |
Dedicated client, fails if immediately connecting to a
server on the other side fails
|
| udp | 0 | x | x | Dedicated client
|
| raw | 0 | x | 0 | Dedicated client, works only as root
|
| tcp, udp | x | x | x |
Client, switches to dedicated server if necessary
|
| tcp, udp | x | 0 | 0 |
Dedicated server
|
| raw | 0 | 0 | 0 | Dedicated server, works only as root
|
| tcp, udp, raw | x | x | 0 | Invalid
|
| tcp, udp, raw | 0 | 0 | x | Invalid
|
| tcp, udp, raw | x | 0 | x | Invalid
|
| tcp, udp | 0 | 0 | 0 | Invalid
|
| tcp, udp | 0 | x | 0 | Invalid
|
| raw | x | 0 | 0 | Invalid
|
| raw | 0 | x | x | Invalid
|
| raw | x | x | x | Invalid
|
Table 2.1: /inet Special File Components
In general, TCP is the preferred mechanism to use. It is the simplest protocol to understand and to use. Use the others only if circumstances demand low-overhead.
This section develops a pair of programs (sender and receiver) that do nothing but send a timestamp from one machine to another. The sender and the receiver are implemented with each of the three protocols available and demonstrate the differences between them.
Once again, always use TCP. (Use UDP when low overhead is a necessity, and use RAW for network experimentation.) The first example is the sender program:
# Server
BEGIN {
print strftime() |& "/inet/tcp/8888/0/0"
close("/inet/tcp/8888/0/0")
}
The receiver is very simple:
# Client
BEGIN {
"/inet/tcp/0/localhost/8888" |& getline
print $0
close("/inet/tcp/0/localhost/8888")
}
TCP guarantees that the bytes arrive at the receiving end in exactly the same order that they were sent. No byte is lost (except for broken connections), doubled, or out of order. Some overhead is necessary to accomplish this, but this is the price to pay for a reliable service. It does matter which side starts first. The sender/server has to be started first, and it waits for the receiver to read a line.
The server and client programs that use UDP are almost identical to their TCP counterparts; only the protocol has changed. As before, it does matter which side starts first. The receiving side blocks and waits for the sender. In this case, the receiver/client has to be started first:
# Server
BEGIN {
print strftime() |& "/inet/udp/8888/0/0"
close("/inet/udp/8888/0/0")
}
The receiver is almost identical to the TCP receiver:
# Client
BEGIN {
"/inet/udp/0/localhost/8888" |& getline
print $0
close("/inet/udp/0/localhost/8888")
}
UDP cannot guarantee that the datagrams at the receiving end will arrive in exactly the same order they were sent. Some datagrams could be lost, some doubled, and some out of order. But no overhead is necessary to accomplish this. This unreliable behavior is good enough for tasks such as data acquisition, logging, and even stateless services like NFS.
This is an IP-level protocol. Only root is allowed to access this
special file. It is meant to be the basis for implementing
and experimenting with transport-level protocols.4
In the most general case,
the sender has to supply the encapsulating header bytes in front of the
packet and the receiver has to strip the additional bytes from the message.
RAW receivers cannot receive packets sent with TCP or UDP because the operating system does not deliver the packets to a RAW receiver. The operating system knows about some of the protocols on top of IP and decides on its own which packet to deliver to which process. (d.c.) Therefore, the UDP receiver must be used for receiving UDP datagrams sent with the RAW sender. This is a dark corner, not only of gawk, but also of TCP/IP.
For extended experimentation with protocols, look into the approach implemented in a tool called SPAK. This tool reflects the hierarchical layering of protocols (encapsulation) in the way data streams are piped out of one program into the next one. It shows which protocol is based on which other (lower-level) protocol by looking at the command-line ordering of the program calls. Cleverly thought out, SPAK is much better than gawk's /inet for learning the meaning of each and every bit in the protocol headers.
The next example uses the RAW protocol to emulate the behavior of UDP. The sender program is the same as above, but with some additional bytes that fill the places of the UDP fields:
BEGIN {
Message = "Hello world\n"
SourcePort = 0
DestinationPort = 8888
MessageLength = length(Message)+8
RawService = "/inet/raw/0/localhost/0"
printf("%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%c%s",
SourcePort/256, SourcePort%256,
DestinationPort/256, DestinationPort%256,
MessageLength/256, MessageLength%256,
0, 0, Message) |& RawService
fflush(RawService)
close(RawService)
}
Since this program tries to emulate the behavior of UDP, it checks if the RAW sender is understood by the UDP receiver but not if the RAW receiver can understand the UDP sender. In a real network, the RAW receiver is hardly of any use because it gets every IP packet that comes across the network. There are usually so many packets that gawk would be too slow for processing them. Only on a network with little traffic can the IP-level receiver program be tested. Programs for analyzing IP traffic on modem or ISDN channels should be possible.
Port numbers do not have a meaning when using /inet/raw. Their fields
have to be `0'. Only TCP and UDP use ports. Receiving data from
/inet/raw is difficult, not only because of processing speed but also
because data is usually binary and not restricted to ASCII. This
implies that line separation with RS does not work as usual.
Let's observe a network connection at work. Type in the following program and watch the output. Within a second, it connects via TCP (/inet/tcp) to the machine it is running on (`localhost') and asks the service `daytime' on the machine what time it is:
BEGIN {
"/inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime" |& getline
print $0
close("/inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime")
}
Even experienced awk users will find the second line strange in two respects:
getline. One would rather expect to see the special file
being read like any other file (`getline <
"/inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime")'.
The `|&' operator was introduced in gawk 3.1 in order to overcome the crucial restriction that access to files and pipes in awk is always unidirectional. It was formerly impossible to use both access modes on the same file or pipe. Instead of changing the whole concept of file access, the `|&' operator behaves exactly like the usual pipe operator except for two additions:
In the earlier example, the `|&' operator tells getline
to read a line from the special file /inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime.
We could also have printed a line into the special file. But instead we just
read a line with the time, printed it, and closed the connection.
(While we could just let gawk close the connection by finishing
the program, in this web page
we are pedantic and always explicitly close the connections.)
It may well be that for some reason the program shown in the previous example does not run on your machine. When looking at possible reasons for this, you will learn much about typical problems that arise in network programming. First of all, your implementation of gawk may not support network access because it is a pre-3.1 version or you do not have a network interface in your machine. Perhaps your machine uses some other protocol, such as DECnet or Novell's IPX. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume you work on a Unix machine that supports TCP/IP. If the previous example program does not run on your machine, it may help to replace the name `localhost' with the name of your machine or its IP address. If it does, you could replace `localhost' with the name of another machine in your vicinity—this way, the program connects to another machine. Now you should see the date and time being printed by the program, otherwise your machine may not support the `daytime' service. Try changing the service to `chargen' or `ftp'. This way, the program connects to other services that should give you some response. If you are curious, you should have a look at your /etc/services file. It could look like this:
# /etc/services:
#
# Network services, Internet style
#
# Name Number/Protcol Alternate name # Comments
echo 7/tcp
echo 7/udp
discard 9/tcp sink null
discard 9/udp sink null
daytime 13/tcp
daytime 13/udp
chargen 19/tcp ttytst source
chargen 19/udp ttytst source
ftp 21/tcp
telnet 23/tcp
smtp 25/tcp mail
finger 79/tcp
www 80/tcp http # WorldWideWeb HTTP
www 80/udp # HyperText Transfer Protocol
pop-2 109/tcp postoffice # POP version 2
pop-2 109/udp
pop-3 110/tcp # POP version 3
pop-3 110/udp
nntp 119/tcp readnews untp # USENET News
irc 194/tcp # Internet Relay Chat
irc 194/udp
...
Here, you find a list of services that traditional Unix machines usually support. If your GNU/Linux machine does not do so, it may be that these services are switched off in some startup script. Systems running some flavor of Microsoft Windows usually do not support these services. Nevertheless, it is possible to do networking with gawk on Microsoft Windows.5 The first column of the file gives the name of the service, and the second column gives a unique number and the protocol that one can use to connect to this service. The rest of the line is treated as a comment. You see that some services (`echo') support TCP as well as UDP.
The next program makes use of the possibility to really interact with a network service by printing something into the special file. It asks the so-called finger service if a user of the machine is logged in. When testing this program, try to change `localhost' to some other machine name in your local network:
BEGIN {
NetService = "/inet/tcp/0/localhost/finger"
print "name" |& NetService
while ((NetService |& getline) > 0)
print $0
close(NetService)
}
After telling the service on the machine which user to look for,
the program repeatedly reads lines that come as a reply. When no more
lines are coming (because the service has closed the connection), the
program also closes the connection. Try replacing "name" with your
login name (or the name of someone else logged in). For a list
of all users currently logged in, replace name with an empty string
("").
The final close command could be safely deleted from
the above script, because the operating system closes any open connection
by default when a script reaches the end of execution. In order to avoid
portability problems, it is best to always close connections explicitly.
With the Linux kernel,
for example, proper closing results in flushing of buffers. Letting
the close happen by default may result in discarding buffers.
When looking at /etc/services you may have noticed that the `daytime' service is also available with `udp'. In the earlier example, change `tcp' to `udp', and change `finger' to `daytime'. After starting the modified program, you see the expected day and time message. The program then hangs, because it waits for more lines coming from the service. However, they never come. This behavior is a consequence of the differences between TCP and UDP. When using UDP, neither party is automatically informed about the other closing the connection. Continuing to experiment this way reveals many other subtle differences between TCP and UDP. To avoid such trouble, one should always remember the advice Douglas E. Comer and David Stevens give in Volume III of their series Internetworking With TCP (page 14):
When designing client-server applications, beginners are strongly advised to use TCP because it provides reliable, connection-oriented communication. Programs only use UDP if the application protocol handles reliability, the application requires hardware broadcast or multicast, or the application cannot tolerate virtual circuit overhead.
The preceding programs behaved as clients that connect to a server somewhere on the Internet and request a particular service. Now we set up such a service to mimic the behavior of the `daytime' service. Such a server does not know in advance who is going to connect to it over the network. Therefore, we cannot insert a name for the host to connect to in our special file name.
Start the following program in one window. Notice that the service does
not have the name `daytime', but the number `8888'.
From looking at /etc/services, you know that names like `daytime'
are just mnemonics for predetermined 16-bit integers.
Only the system administrator (root) could enter
our new service into /etc/services with an appropriate name.
Also notice that the service name has to be entered into a different field
of the special file name because we are setting up a server, not a client:
BEGIN {
print strftime() |& "/inet/tcp/8888/0/0"
close("/inet/tcp/8888/0/0")
}
Now open another window on the same machine. Copy the client program given as the first example (see Establishing a TCP Connection) to a new file and edit it, changing the name `daytime' to `8888'. Then start the modified client. You should get a reply like this:
Sat Sep 27 19:08:16 CEST 1997
Both programs explicitly close the connection.
Now we will intentionally make a mistake to see what happens when the name
`8888' (the so-called port) is already used by another service.
Start the server
program in both windows. The first one works, but the second one
complains that it could not open the connection. Each port on a single
machine can only be used by one server program at a time. Now terminate the
server program and change the name `8888' to `echo'. After restarting it,
the server program does not run any more, and you know why: there is already
an `echo' service running on your machine. But even if this isn't true,
you would not get
your own `echo' server running on a Unix machine,
because the ports with numbers smaller
than 1024 (`echo' is at port 7) are reserved for root.
On machines running some flavor of Microsoft Windows, there is no restriction
that reserves ports 1 to 1024 for a privileged user; hence, you can start
an `echo' server there.
Turning this short server program into something really useful is simple. Imagine a server that first reads a file name from the client through the network connection, then does something with the file and sends a result back to the client. The server-side processing could be:
BEGIN {
NetService = "/inet/tcp/8888/0/0"
NetService |& getline
CatPipe = ("cat " $1) # sets $0 and the fields
while ((CatPipe | getline) > 0)
print $0 |& NetService
close(NetService)
}
and we would have a remote copying facility. Such a server reads the name of a file from any client that connects to it and transmits the contents of the named file across the net. The server-side processing could also be the execution of a command that is transmitted across the network. From this example, you can see how simple it is to open up a security hole on your machine. If you allow clients to connect to your machine and execute arbitrary commands, anyone would be free to do `rm -rf *'.
The distribution of email is usually done by dedicated email servers that communicate with your machine using special protocols. To receive email, we will use the Post Office Protocol (POP). Sending can be done with the much older Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
When you type in the following program, replace the emailhost by the name of your local email server. Ask your administrator if the server has a POP service, and then use its name or number in the program below. Now the program is ready to connect to your email server, but it will not succeed in retrieving your mail because it does not yet know your login name or password. Replace them in the program and it shows you the first email the server has in store:
BEGIN {
POPService = "/inet/tcp/0/emailhost/pop3"
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
print "user name" |& POPService
POPService |& getline
print "pass password" |& POPService
POPService |& getline
print "retr 1" |& POPService
POPService |& getline
if ($1 != "+OK") exit
print "quit" |& POPService
RS = "\r\n\\.\r\n"
POPService |& getline
print $0
close(POPService)
}
The record separators RS and ORS are redefined because the
protocol (POP) requires CR-LF to separate lines. After identifying
yourself to the email service, the command `retr 1' instructs the
service to send the first of all your email messages in line. If the service
replies with something other than `+OK', the program exits; maybe there
is no email. Otherwise, the program first announces that it intends to finish
reading email, and then redefines RS in order to read the entire
email as multiline input in one record. From the POP RFC, we know that the body
of the email always ends with a single line containing a single dot.
The program looks for this using `RS = "\r\n\\.\r\n"'.
When it finds this sequence in the mail message, it quits.
You can invoke this program as often as you like; it does not delete the
message it reads, but instead leaves it on the server.
Retrieving a web page from a web server is as simple as retrieving email from an email server. We only have to use a similar, but not identical, protocol and a different port. The name of the protocol is HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the port number is usually 80. As in the preceding section, ask your administrator about the name of your local web server or proxy web server and its port number for HTTP requests.
The following program employs a rather crude approach toward retrieving a web page. It uses the prehistoric syntax of HTTP 0.9, which almost all web servers still support. The most noticeable thing about it is that the program directs the request to the local proxy server whose name you insert in the special file name (which in turn calls `www.yahoo.com'):
BEGIN {
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/0/proxy/80"
print "GET http://www.yahoo.com" |& HttpService
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
print $0
close(HttpService)
}
Again, lines are separated by a redefined RS and ORS.
The GET request that we send to the server is the only kind of
HTTP request that existed when the web was created in the early 1990s.
HTTP calls this GET request a “method,” which tells the
service to transmit a web page (here the home page of the Yahoo! search
engine). Version 1.0 added the request methods HEAD and
POST. The current version of HTTP is 1.1,6 and knows the additional request
methods OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, and TRACE.
You can fill in any valid web address, and the program prints the
HTML code of that page to your screen.
Notice the similarity between the responses of the POP and HTTP services. First, you get a header that is terminated by an empty line, and then you get the body of the page in HTML. The lines of the headers also have the same form as in POP. There is the name of a parameter, then a colon, and finally the value of that parameter.
Images (.png or .gif files) can also be retrieved this way, but then you get binary data that should be redirected into a file. Another application is calling a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script on some server. CGI scripts are used when the contents of a web page are not constant, but generated instantly at the moment you send a request for the page. For example, to get a detailed report about the current quotes of Motorola stock shares, call a CGI script at Yahoo! with the following:
get = "GET http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=MOT&d=t"
print get |& HttpService
You can also request weather reports this way.
Now we know enough about HTTP to set up a primitive web service that just
says "Hello, world" when someone connects to it with a browser.
Compared
to the situation in the preceding section, our program changes the role. It
tries to behave just like the server we have observed. Since we are setting
up a server here, we have to insert the port number in the `localport'
field of the special file name. The other two fields (hostname and
remoteport) have to contain a `0' because we do not know in
advance which host will connect to our service.
In the early 1990s, all a server had to do was send an HTML document and close the connection. Here, we adhere to the modern syntax of HTTP. The steps are as follows:
"Hello, world" body
in HTML.
The useless while loop swallows the request of the browser.
We could actually omit the loop, and on most machines the program would still
work.
First, start the following program:
BEGIN {
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/8080/0/0"
Hello = "<HTML><HEAD>" \
"<TITLE>A Famous Greeting</TITLE></HEAD>" \
"<BODY><H1>Hello, world</H1></BODY></HTML>"
Len = length(Hello) + length(ORS)
print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK" |& HttpService
print "Content-Length: " Len ORS |& HttpService
print Hello |& HttpService
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
continue;
close(HttpService)
}
Now, on the same machine, start your favorite browser and let it point to http://localhost:8080 (the browser needs to know on which port our server is listening for requests). If this does not work, the browser probably tries to connect to a proxy server that does not know your machine. If so, change the browser's configuration so that the browser does not try to use a proxy to connect to your machine.
Setting up a web service that allows user interaction is more difficult and
shows us the limits of network access in gawk. In this section,
we develop a main program (a BEGIN pattern and its action)
that will become the core of event-driven execution controlled by a
graphical user interface (GUI).
Each HTTP event that the user triggers by some action within the browser
is received in this central procedure. Parameters and menu choices are
extracted from this request, and an appropriate measure is taken according to
the user's choice.
For example:
BEGIN {
if (MyHost == "") {
"uname -n" | getline MyHost
close("uname -n")
}
if (MyPort == 0) MyPort = 8080
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/" MyPort "/0/0"
MyPrefix = "http://" MyHost ":" MyPort
SetUpServer()
while ("awk" != "complex") {
# header lines are terminated this way
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
Status = 200 # this means OK
Reason = "OK"
Header = TopHeader
Document = TopDoc
Footer = TopFooter
if (GETARG["Method"] == "GET") {
HandleGET()
} else if (GETARG["Method"] == "HEAD") {
# not yet implemented
} else if (GETARG["Method"] != "") {
print "bad method", GETARG["Method"]
}
Prompt = Header Document Footer
print "HTTP/1.0", Status, Reason |& HttpService
print "Connection: Close" |& HttpService
print "Pragma: no-cache" |& HttpService
len = length(Prompt) + length(ORS)
print "Content-length:", len |& HttpService
print ORS Prompt |& HttpService
# ignore all the header lines
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
;
# stop talking to this client
close(HttpService)
# wait for new client request
HttpService |& getline
# do some logging
print systime(), strftime(), $0
# read request parameters
CGI_setup($1, $2, $3)
}
}
This web server presents menu choices in the form of HTML links. Therefore, it has to tell the browser the name of the host it is residing on. When starting the server, the user may supply the name of the host from the command line with `gawk -v MyHost="Rumpelstilzchen"'. If the user does not do this, the server looks up the name of the host it is running on for later use as a web address in HTML documents. The same applies to the port number. These values are inserted later into the HTML content of the web pages to refer to the home system.
Each server that is built around this core has to initialize some
application-dependent variables (such as the default home page) in a procedure
SetUpServer, which is called immediately before entering the
infinite loop of the server. For now, we will write an instance that
initiates a trivial interaction. With this home page, the client user
can click on two possible choices, and receive the current date either
in human-readable format or in seconds since 1970:
function SetUpServer() {
TopHeader = "<HTML><HEAD>"
TopHeader = TopHeader \
"<title>My name is GAWK, GNU AWK</title></HEAD>"
TopDoc = "<BODY><h2>\
Do you prefer your date <A HREF=" MyPrefix \
"/human>human</A> or \
<A HREF=" MyPrefix "/POSIX>POSIXed</A>?</h2>" ORS ORS
TopFooter = "</BODY></HTML>"
}
On the first run through the main loop, the default line terminators are
set and the default home page is copied to the actual home page. Since this
is the first run, GETARG["Method"] is not initialized yet, hence the
case selection over the method does nothing. Now that the home page is
initialized, the server can start communicating to a client browser.
It does so by printing the HTTP header into the network connection (`print ... |& HttpService'). This command blocks execution of the server script until a client connects. If this server script is compared with the primitive one we wrote before, you will notice two additional lines in the header. The first instructs the browser to close the connection after each request. The second tells the browser that it should never try to remember earlier requests that had identical web addresses (no caching). Otherwise, it could happen that the browser retrieves the time of day in the previous example just once, and later it takes the web page from the cache, always displaying the same time of day although time advances each second.
Having supplied the initial home page to the browser with a valid document
stored in the parameter Prompt, it closes the connection and waits
for the next request. When the request comes, a log line is printed that
allows us to see which request the server receives. The final step in the
loop is to call the function CGI_setup, which reads all the lines
of the request (coming from the browser), processes them, and stores the
transmitted parameters in the array PARAM. The complete
text of these application-independent functions can be found in
A Simple CGI Library.
For now, we use a simplified version of CGI_setup:
function CGI_setup( method, uri, version, i) {
delete GETARG; delete MENU; delete PARAM
GETARG["Method"] = $1
GETARG["URI"] = $2
GETARG["Version"] = $3
i = index($2, "?")
# is there a "?" indicating a CGI request?
if (i > 0) {
split(substr($2, 1, i-1), MENU, "[/:]")
split(substr($2, i+1), PARAM, "&")
for (i in PARAM) {
j = index(PARAM[i], "=")
GETARG[substr(PARAM[i], 1, j-1)] = \
substr(PARAM[i], j+1)
}
} else { # there is no "?", no need for splitting PARAMs
split($2, MENU, "[/:]")
}
}
At first, the function clears all variables used for
global storage of request parameters. The rest of the function serves
the purpose of filling the global parameters with the extracted new values.
To accomplish this, the name of the requested resource is split into
parts and stored for later evaluation. If the request contains a `?',
then the request has CGI variables seamlessly appended to the web address.
Everything in front of the `?' is split up into menu items, and
everything behind the `?' is a list of `variable=value' pairs
(separated by `&') that also need splitting. This way, CGI variables are
isolated and stored. This procedure lacks recognition of special characters
that are transmitted in coded form7. Here, any
optional request header and body parts are ignored. We do not need
header parameters and the request body. However, when refining our approach or
working with the POST and PUT methods, reading the header
and body
becomes inevitable. Header parameters should then be stored in a global
array as well as the body.
On each subsequent run through the main loop, one request from a browser is
received, evaluated, and answered according to the user's choice. This can be
done by letting the value of the HTTP method guide the main loop into
execution of the procedure HandleGET, which evaluates the user's
choice. In this case, we have only one hierarchical level of menus,
but in the general case,
menus are nested.
The menu choices at each level are
separated by `/', just as in file names. Notice how simple it is to
construct menus of arbitrary depth:
function HandleGET() {
if ( MENU[2] == "human") {
Footer = strftime() TopFooter
} else if (MENU[2] == "POSIX") {
Footer = systime() TopFooter
}
}
The disadvantage of this approach is that our server is slow and can
handle only one request at a time. Its main advantage, however, is that
the server
consists of just one gawk program. No need for installing an
httpd, and no need for static separate HTML files, CGI scripts, or
root privileges. This is rapid prototyping.
This program can be started on the same host that runs your browser.
Then let your browser point to http://localhost:8080.
It is also possible to include images into the HTML pages.
Most browsers support the not very well-known
.xbm format,
which may contain only
monochrome pictures but is an ASCII format. Binary images are possible but
not so easy to handle. Another way of including images is to generate them
with a tool such as GNUPlot,
by calling the tool with the system function or through a pipe.
HTTP is like being married: you have to be able to handle whatever you're given, while being very careful what you send back.
Phil Smith III,
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Mar/http.html
In A Web Service with Interaction,
we saw the function CGI_setup as part of the web server
“core logic” framework. The code presented there handles almost
everything necessary for CGI requests.
One thing it doesn't do is handle encoded characters in the requests.
For example, an `&' is encoded as a percent sign followed by
the hexadecimal value: `%26'. These encoded values should be
decoded.
Following is a simple library to perform these tasks.
This code is used for all web server examples
used throughout the rest of this web page.
If you want to use it for your own web server, store the source code
into a file named inetlib.awk. Then you can include
these functions into your code by placing the following statement
into your program
(on the first line of your script):
@include inetlib.awk
But beware, this mechanism is only possible if you invoke your web server script with igawk instead of the usual awk or gawk. Here is the code:
# CGI Library and core of a web server
# Global arrays
# GETARG --- arguments to CGI GET command
# MENU --- menu items (path names)
# PARAM --- parameters of form x=y
# Optional variable MyHost contains host address
# Optional variable MyPort contains port number
# Needs TopHeader, TopDoc, TopFooter
# Sets MyPrefix, HttpService, Status, Reason
BEGIN {
if (MyHost == "") {
"uname -n" | getline MyHost
close("uname -n")
}
if (MyPort == 0) MyPort = 8080
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/" MyPort "/0/0"
MyPrefix = "http://" MyHost ":" MyPort
SetUpServer()
while ("awk" != "complex") {
# header lines are terminated this way
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
Status = 200 # this means OK
Reason = "OK"
Header = TopHeader
Document = TopDoc
Footer = TopFooter
if (GETARG["Method"] == "GET") {
HandleGET()
} else if (GETARG["Method"] == "HEAD") {
# not yet implemented
} else if (GETARG["Method"] != "") {
print "bad method", GETARG["Method"]
}
Prompt = Header Document Footer
print "HTTP/1.0", Status, Reason |& HttpService
print "Connection: Close" |& HttpService
print "Pragma: no-cache" |& HttpService
len = length(Prompt) + length(ORS)
print "Content-length:", len |& HttpService
print ORS Prompt |& HttpService
# ignore all the header lines
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
continue
# stop talking to this client
close(HttpService)
# wait for new client request
HttpService |& getline
# do some logging
print systime(), strftime(), $0
CGI_setup($1, $2, $3)
}
}
function CGI_setup( method, uri, version, i)
{
delete GETARG
delete MENU
delete PARAM
GETARG["Method"] = method
GETARG["URI"] = uri
GETARG["Version"] = version
i = index(uri, "?")
if (i > 0) { # is there a "?" indicating a CGI request?
split(substr(uri, 1, i-1), MENU, "[/:]")
split(substr(uri, i+1), PARAM, "&")
for (i in PARAM) {
PARAM[i] = _CGI_decode(PARAM[i])
j = index(PARAM[i], "=")
GETARG[substr(PARAM[i], 1, j-1)] = \
substr(PARAM[i], j+1)
}
} else { # there is no "?", no need for splitting PARAMs
split(uri, MENU, "[/:]")
}
for (i in MENU) # decode characters in path
if (i > 4) # but not those in host name
MENU[i] = _CGI_decode(MENU[i])
}
This isolates details in a single function, CGI_setup.
Decoding of encoded characters is pushed off to a helper function,
_CGI_decode. The use of the leading underscore (`_') in
the function name is intended to indicate that it is an “internal”
function, although there is nothing to enforce this:
function _CGI_decode(str, hexdigs, i, pre, code1, code2,
val, result)
{
hexdigs = "123456789abcdef"
i = index(str, "%")
if (i == 0) # no work to do
return str
do {
pre = substr(str, 1, i-1) # part before %xx
code1 = substr(str, i+1, 1) # first hex digit
code2 = substr(str, i+2, 1) # second hex digit
str = substr(str, i+3) # rest of string
code1 = tolower(code1)
code2 = tolower(code2)
val = index(hexdigs, code1) * 16 \
+ index(hexdigs, code2)
result = result pre sprintf("%c", val)
i = index(str, "%")
} while (i != 0)
if (length(str) > 0)
result = result str
return result
}
This works by splitting the string apart around an encoded character.
The two digits are converted to lowercase characters and looked up in a string
of hex digits. Note that 0 is not in the string on purpose;
index returns zero when it's not found, automatically giving
the correct value! Once the hexadecimal value is converted from
characters in a string into a numerical value, sprintf
converts the value back into a real character.
The following is a simple test harness for the above functions:
BEGIN {
CGI_setup("GET",
"http://www.gnu.org/cgi-bin/foo?p1=stuff&p2=stuff%26junk" \
"&percent=a %25 sign",
"1.0")
for (i in MENU)
printf "MENU[\"%s\"] = %s\n", i, MENU[i]
for (i in PARAM)
printf "PARAM[\"%s\"] = %s\n", i, PARAM[i]
for (i in GETARG)
printf "GETARG[\"%s\"] = %s\n", i, GETARG[i]
}
And this is the result when we run it:
$ gawk -f testserv.awk
-| MENU["4"] = www.gnu.org
-| MENU["5"] = cgi-bin
-| MENU["6"] = foo
-| MENU["1"] = http
-| MENU["2"] =
-| MENU["3"] =
-| PARAM["1"] = p1=stuff
-| PARAM["2"] = p2=stuff&junk
-| PARAM["3"] = percent=a % sign
-| GETARG["p1"] = stuff
-| GETARG["percent"] = a % sign
-| GETARG["p2"] = stuff&junk
-| GETARG["Method"] = GET
-| GETARG["Version"] = 1.0
-| GETARG["URI"] = http://www.gnu.org/cgi-bin/foo?p1=stuff&
p2=stuff%26junk&percent=a %25 sign
In the preceding section, we built the core logic for event-driven GUIs. In this section, we finally extend the core to a real application. No one would actually write a commercial web server in gawk, but it is instructive to see that it is feasible in principle.
The application is ELIZA, the famous program by Joseph Weizenbaum that mimics the behavior of a professional psychotherapist when talking to you. Weizenbaum would certainly object to this description, but this is part of the legend around ELIZA. Take the site-independent core logic and append the following code:
function SetUpServer() {
SetUpEliza()
TopHeader = \
"<HTML><title>An HTTP-based System with GAWK</title>\
<HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV=\"Content-Type\"\
CONTENT=\"text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\"></HEAD>\
<BODY BGCOLOR=\"#ffffff\" TEXT=\"#000000\"\
LINK=\"#0000ff\" VLINK=\"#0000ff\"\
ALINK=\"#0000ff\"> <A NAME=\"top\">"
TopDoc = "\
<h2>Please choose one of the following actions:</h2>\
<UL>\
<LI>\
<A HREF=" MyPrefix "/AboutServer>About this server</A>\
</LI><LI>\
<A HREF=" MyPrefix "/AboutELIZA>About Eliza</A></LI>\
<LI>\
<A HREF=" MyPrefix \
"/StartELIZA>Start talking to Eliza</A></LI></UL>"
TopFooter = "</BODY></HTML>"
}
SetUpServer is similar to the previous example,
except for calling another function, SetUpEliza.
This approach can be used to implement other kinds of servers.
The only changes needed to do so are hidden in the functions
SetUpServer and HandleGET. Perhaps it might be necessary to
implement other HTTP methods.
The igawk program that comes with gawk
may be useful for this process.
When extending this example to a complete application, the first
thing to do is to implement the function SetUpServer to
initialize the HTML pages and some variables. These initializations
determine the way your HTML pages look (colors, titles, menu
items, etc.).
The function HandleGET is a nested case selection that decides
which page the user wants to see next. Each nesting level refers to a menu
level of the GUI. Each case implements a certain action of the menu. On the
deepest level of case selection, the handler essentially knows what the
user wants and stores the answer into the variable that holds the HTML
page contents:
function HandleGET() {
# A real HTTP server would treat some parts of the URI as a file name.
# We take parts of the URI as menu choices and go on accordingly.
if(MENU[2] == "AboutServer") {
Document = "This is not a CGI script.\
This is an httpd, an HTML file, and a CGI script all \
in one GAWK script. It needs no separate www-server, \
no installation, and no root privileges.\
<p>To run it, do this:</p><ul>\
<li> start this script with \"gawk -f httpserver.awk\",</li>\
<li> and on the same host let your www browser open location\
\"http://localhost:8080\"</li>\
</ul>\<p>\ Details of HTTP come from:</p><ul>\
<li>Hethmon: Illustrated Guide to HTTP</p>\
<li>RFC 2068</li></ul><p>JK 14.9.1997</p>"
} else if (MENU[2] == "AboutELIZA") {
Document = "This is an implementation of the famous ELIZA\
program by Joseph Weizenbaum. It is written in GAWK and\
/bin/sh: expad: command not found
} else if (MENU[2] == "StartELIZA") {
gsub(/\+/, " ", GETARG["YouSay"])
# Here we also have to substitute coded special characters
Document = "<form method=GET>" \
"<h3>" ElizaSays(GETARG["YouSay"]) "</h3>\
<p><input type=text name=YouSay value=\"\" size=60>\
<br><input type=submit value=\"Tell her about it\"></p></form>"
}
}
Now we are down to the heart of ELIZA, so you can see how it works. Initially the user does not say anything; then ELIZA resets its money counter and asks the user to tell what comes to mind open heartedly. The subsequent answers are converted to uppercase characters and stored for later comparison. ELIZA presents the bill when being confronted with a sentence that contains the phrase “shut up.” Otherwise, it looks for keywords in the sentence, conjugates the rest of the sentence, remembers the keyword for later use, and finally selects an answer from the set of possible answers:
function ElizaSays(YouSay) {
if (YouSay == "") {
cost = 0
answer = "HI, IM ELIZA, TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM"
} else {
q = toupper(YouSay)
gsub("'", "", q)
if(q == qold) {
answer = "PLEASE DONT REPEAT YOURSELF !"
} else {
if (index(q, "SHUT UP") > 0) {
answer = "WELL, PLEASE PAY YOUR BILL. ITS EXACTLY ... $"\
int(100*rand()+30+cost/100)
} else {
qold = q
w = "-" # no keyword recognized yet
for (i in k) { # search for keywords
if (index(q, i) > 0) {
w = i
break
}
}
if (w == "-") { # no keyword, take old subject
w = wold
subj = subjold
} else { # find subject
subj = substr(q, index(q, w) + length(w)+1)
wold = w
subjold = subj # remember keyword and subject
}
for (i in conj)
gsub(i, conj[i], q) # conjugation
# from all answers to this keyword, select one randomly
answer = r[indices[int(split(k[w], indices) * rand()) + 1]]
# insert subject into answer
gsub("_", subj, answer)
}
}
}
cost += length(answer) # for later payment : 1 cent per character
return answer
}
In the long but simple function SetUpEliza, you can see tables
for conjugation, keywords, and answers.8 The associative array k
contains indices into the array of answers r. To choose an
answer, ELIZA just picks an index randomly:
function SetUpEliza() {
srand()
wold = "-"
subjold = " "
# table for conjugation
conj[" ARE " ] = " AM "
conj["WERE " ] = "WAS "
conj[" YOU " ] = " I "
conj["YOUR " ] = "MY "
conj[" IVE " ] =\
conj[" I HAVE " ] = " YOU HAVE "
conj[" YOUVE " ] =\
conj[" YOU HAVE "] = " I HAVE "
conj[" IM " ] =\
conj[" I AM " ] = " YOU ARE "
conj[" YOURE " ] =\
conj[" YOU ARE " ] = " I AM "
# table of all answers
r[1] = "DONT YOU BELIEVE THAT I CAN _"
r[2] = "PERHAPS YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE ABLE TO _ ?"
...
# table for looking up answers that
# fit to a certain keyword
k["CAN YOU"] = "1 2 3"
k["CAN I"] = "4 5"
k["YOU ARE"] =\
k["YOURE"] = "6 7 8 9"
...
}
Some interesting remarks and details (including the original source code of ELIZA) are found on Mark Humphrys' home page. Yahoo! also has a page with a collection of ELIZA-like programs. Many of them are written in Java, some of them disclosing the Java source code, and a few even explain how to modify the Java source code.
By now it should be clear that debugging a networked application is more complicated than debugging a single-process single-hosted application. The behavior of a networked application sometimes looks noncausal because it is not reproducible in a strong sense. Whether a network application works or not sometimes depends on the following:
The most difficult problems for a beginner arise from the hidden states of the underlying network. After closing a TCP connection, it's often necessary to wait a short while before reopening the connection. Even more difficult is the establishment of a connection that previously ended with a “broken pipe.” Those connections have to “time out” for a minute or so before they can reopen. Check this with the command `netstat -a', which provides a list of still “active” connections.
Now, you have learned enough to build your own application. You could, for example, take part in the Loebner Contest to win $100,000. The Loebner Prize is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense. Here is an example of a conversation with the winning program of 1997:
(c)1997 Cambridge Center For Behavioral Studies all rights reserved [CONVERSE]
[Intelligent Research Ltd.] Start at: [1997/04/29 08:59:40]
PROGRAM[10:39:20]Hi, my name is Catherine, what's yours?
JUDGE02[10:39:36]My name is Nathan.
PROGRAM[10:39:37]Well, it's nice to meet you, Nathan.
PROGRAM[10:39:45]Did you see that story on CNN last night about the lesbian
PROGRAM[10:40:03]couple who came out at a White House party on Sunday?
JUDGE02[10:40:45]No. I'm sorry I missed that. How did the Prez take it?
PROGRAM[10:40:47]Ellen Degeneres was one of them - she was kissing her lover
PROGRAM[10:41:08]in front of Bill Clinton. Do you think he was very
PROGRAM[10:41:21]embarrassed?
JUDGE02[10:41:37]You tell me. I didn't see it.
PROGRAM[10:41:38]Are you still a Friend of Bill Clinton?
JUDGE02[10:42:22]Yes. I would like to talk about something else. Do you know anything about sculpture.
PROGRAM[10:42:24]Well, I suppose he's doing his best like most of us, but he
PROGRAM[10:42:35]does seem to attract an UNUSUAL amount of bad publicity,
PROGRAM[10:42:51]wouldnt you say--can it all be bad luck?
JUDGE02[10:43:20]I asked you if you knew anything about sculpture.
PROGRAM[10:43:21]OK, but what happens now--does it all drift on, with
PROGRAM[10:43:36]everyone waiting to see how much his friends have said about
PROGRAM[10:43:47]him under threat of lots and lots of jail-or will something
PROGRAM[10:44:01]dramatic actually happen?
JUDGE02[10:44:19]Do you know what sculpture is?
PROGRAM[10:44:20]Well, youre more a fan of his than I am I guess---though I
PROGRAM[10:44:34]cant SWEAR what Id have done in that locked hotel room, I
PROGRAM[10:44:51]must say.
JUDGE02[10:45:26]Have you ever been to the Salmagundi Club?
PROGRAM[10:45:29]Never. to go back to the original discussion Time to get
PROGRAM[10:45:43]off this one I think and onto something more down to earth!
JUDGE02[10:46:20]What is more down to earth than art?
PROGRAM[10:46:21]I don't know what -- to be honest. -
PROGRAM[10:46:30]I suppose it depends on where you're coming from, but as the
PROGRAM[10:46:46]song goes in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a woman be more like a
PROGRAM[10:47:03]man? "
JUDGE02[10:47:52]I liked that song but I prefer "Why can't children be more like we are"
JUDGE02[10:48:10]from another play the name of which I cannot remember.
PROGRAM[10:48:12]What, if anything, do you enjoy about being a man?
JUDGE02[10:49:01]I would enjoy all aspects of life no matter what my gender.
PROGRAM[10:49:02]Do you think of yourself as being attractive?
This program insists on always speaking about the same story around Bill Clinton. You see, even a program with a rather narrow mind can behave so much like a human being that it can win this prize. It is quite common to let these programs talk to each other via network connections. But during the competition itself, the program and its computer have to be present at the place the competition is held. We all would love to see a gawk program win in such an event. Maybe it is up to you to accomplish this?
Some other ideas for useful networked applications:
The GAWK manual can be consumed in a single lab session and the language can be mastered by the next morning by the average student. GAWK's automatic initialization, implicit coercion, I/O support and lack of pointers forgive many of the mistakes that young programmers are likely to make. Those who have seen C but not mastered it are happy to see that GAWK retains some of the same sensibilities while adding what must be regarded as spoonsful of syntactic sugar.
...
There are further simple answers. Probably the best is the fact that increasingly, undergraduate AI programming is involving the Web. Oren Etzioni (University of Washington, Seattle) has for a while been arguing that the “softbot” is replacing the mechanical engineers' robot as the most glamorous AI testbed. If the artifact whose behavior needs to be controlled in an intelligent way is the software agent, then a language that is well-suited to controlling the software environment is the appropriate language. That would imply a scripting language. If the robot is KAREL, then the right language is “turn left; turn right.” If the robot is Netscape, then the right language is something that can generate `netscape -remote 'openURL(http://cs.wustl.edu/~loui)'' with elan.
...
AI programming requires high-level thinking. There have always been a few gifted programmers who can write high-level programs in assembly language. Most however need the ambient abstraction to have a higher floor.
...
Second, inference is merely the expansion of notation. No matter whether the logic that underlies an AI program is fuzzy, probabilistic, deontic, defeasible, or deductive, the logic merely defines how strings can be transformed into other strings. A language that provides the best support for string processing in the end provides the best support for logic, for the exploration of various logics, and for most forms of symbolic processing that AI might choose to call “reasoning” instead of “logic.” The implication is that PROLOG, which saves the AI programmer from having to write a unifier, saves perhaps two dozen lines of GAWK code at the expense of strongly biasing the logic and representational expressiveness of any approach.
Now that gawk itself can connect to the Internet, it should be obvious that it is suitable for writing intelligent web agents.
In this chapter, we look at a number of self-contained scripts, with an emphasis on concise networking. Along the way, we work towards creating building blocks that encapsulate often needed functions of the networking world, show new techniques that broaden the scope of problems that can be solved with gawk, and explore leading edge technology that may shape the future of networking.
We often refer to the site-independent core of the server that
we built in
A Simple Web Server.
When building new and nontrivial servers, we
always copy this building block and append new instances of the two
functions SetUpServer and HandleGET.
This makes a lot of sense, since this scheme of event-driven execution provides gawk with an interface to the most widely accepted standard for GUIs: the web browser. Now, gawk can rival even Tcl/Tk.
Tcl and gawk have much in common. Both are simple scripting languages that allow us to quickly solve problems with short programs. But Tcl has Tk on top of it, and gawk had nothing comparable up to now. While Tcl needs a large and ever-changing library (Tk, which was bound to the X Window System until recently), gawk needs just the networking interface and some kind of browser on the client's side. Besides better portability, the most important advantage of this approach (embracing well-established standards such HTTP and HTML) is that we do not need to change the language. We let others do the work of fighting over protocols and standards. We can use HTML, JavaScript, VRML, or whatever else comes along to do our work.
At first glance, the "Hello, world" example in
A Primitive Web Service,
seems useless. By adding just a few lines, we can turn it into something useful.
The PANIC program tells everyone who connects that the local site is not working. When a web server breaks down, it makes a difference if customers get a strange “network unreachable” message, or a short message telling them that the server has a problem. In such an emergency, the hard disk and everything on it (including the regular web service) may be unavailable. Rebooting the web server off a diskette makes sense in this setting.
To use the PANIC program as an emergency web server, all you need are the gawk executable and the program below on a diskette. By default, it connects to port 8080. A different value may be supplied on the command line:
BEGIN {
RS = ORS = "\r\n"
if (MyPort == 0) MyPort = 8080
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/" MyPort "/0/0"
Hello = "<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Out Of Service</TITLE>" \
"</HEAD><BODY><H1>" \
"This site is temporarily out of service." \
"</H1></BODY></HTML>"
Len = length(Hello) + length(ORS)
while ("awk" != "complex") {
print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK" |& HttpService
print "Content-Length: " Len ORS |& HttpService
print Hello |& HttpService
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
continue;
close(HttpService)
}
}
GETURL is a versatile building block for shell scripts that need to retrieve files from the Internet. It takes a web address as a command-line parameter and tries to retrieve the contents of this address. The contents are printed to standard output, while the header is printed to /dev/stderr. A surrounding shell script could analyze the contents and extract the text or the links. An ASCII browser could be written around GETURL. But more interestingly, web robots are straightforward to write on top of GETURL. On the Internet, you can find several programs of the same name that do the same job. They are usually much more complex internally and at least 10 times longer.
At first, GETURL checks if it was called with exactly one web address.
Then, it checks if the user chose to use a special proxy server whose name
is handed over in a variable. By default, it is assumed that the local
machine serves as proxy. GETURL uses the GET method by default
to access the web page. By handing over the name of a different method
(such as HEAD), it is possible to choose a different behavior. With
the HEAD method, the user does not receive the body of the page
content, but does receive the header:
BEGIN {
if (ARGC != 2) {
print "GETURL - retrieve Web page via HTTP 1.0"
print "IN:\n the URL as a command-line parameter"
print "PARAM(S):\n -v Proxy=MyProxy"
print "OUT:\n the page content on stdout"
print " the page header on stderr"
print "JK 16.05.1997"
print "ADR 13.08.2000"
exit
}
URL = ARGV[1]; ARGV[1] = ""
if (Proxy == "") Proxy = "127.0.0.1"
if (ProxyPort == 0) ProxyPort = 80
if (Method == "") Method = "GET"
HttpService = "/inet/tcp/0/" Proxy "/" ProxyPort
ORS = RS = "\r\n\r\n"
print Method " " URL " HTTP/1.0" |& HttpService
HttpService |& getline Header
print Header > "/dev/stderr"
while ((HttpService |& getline) > 0)
printf "%s", $0
close(HttpService)
}
This program can be changed as needed, but be careful with the last lines.
Make sure transmission of binary data is not corrupted by additional line
breaks. Even as it is now, the byte sequence "\r\n\r\n" would
disappear if it were contained in binary data. Don't get caught in a
trap when trying a quick fix on this one.
Today, you often find powerful processors in embedded systems. Dedicated network routers and controllers for all kinds of machinery are examples of embedded systems. Processors like the Intel 80x86 or the AMD Elan are able to run multitasking operating systems, such as XINU or GNU/Linux in embedded PCs. These systems are small and usually do not have a keyboard or a display. Therefore it is difficult to set up their configuration. There are several widespread ways to set them up:
In this section, we look at a solution that uses HTTP connections
to control variables of an embedded system that are stored in a file.
Since embedded systems have tight limits on resources like memory,
it is difficult to employ advanced techniques such as SNMP and HTTP
servers. gawk fits in quite nicely with its single executable
which needs just a short script to start working.
The following program stores the variables in a file, and a concurrent
process in the embedded system may read the file. The program uses the
site-independent part of the simple web server that we developed in
A Web Service with Interaction.
As mentioned there, all we have to do is to write two new procedures
SetUpServer and HandleGET:
function SetUpServer() {
TopHeader = "<HTML><title>Remote Configuration</title>"
TopDoc = "<BODY>\
<h2>Please choose one of the following actions:</h2>\
<UL>\
<LI><A HREF=" MyPrefix "/AboutServer>About this server</A></LI>\
<LI><A HREF=" MyPrefix "/ReadConfig>Read Configuration</A></LI>\
<LI><A HREF=" MyPrefix "/CheckConfig>Check Configuration</A></LI>\
<LI><A HREF=" MyPrefix "/ChangeConfig>Change Configuration</A></LI>\
<LI><A HREF=" MyPrefix "/SaveConfig>Save Configuration</A></LI>\
</UL>"
TopFooter = "</BODY></HTML>"