editing ****.cgi files?

how to edit .cgi files to make simple changes?

[ControlEngineer]

I have been helping a friend edit some pages of an organization's web page. As in many small non-profit local organizations, there is a turn over of people. The creators of the site have moved out of town.

Most of the pages are html. I have used Front Page and text editors to edit (usually changing officer's names and other text) those pages. Several pages are .cgi. Looking at the source (using IE) the parts of the pages are relatively simple (correcting some names and spellings, no change in functions of the scripts).

What do I need to edit .cgi files just to change a spelling or other text that appears on the page? I am not familiar with perl, etc. and will not be making any functional changes.

Thanks

[georgiek50]

Any text editor will do, such as Notepad. It would be more helpful to have something with syntax highlighting, I recommend the syn text editor. Do a Google search for it, free program.

[walkman]

Textpad is great too. Technically not free, but if you don't mind closing the "buy now" windows, it's free. I eventually paid though. Felt guilty ;)

[ControlEngineer]

Thanks GeorgieK50 and Walkman, for the help. I am able to use Notepad and Wordpad to edit, if I get more involved I will look for more full featured editors.

My problem right now is finding what to edit. In the site for a small local organization, the former (now out of town) webmaster has such things as a members list using .cgi. The page that the list is on is www.____ .org/cgi/members.cgi.

I call up the page in IE and view source and I see what a typical .html page looks like. I see text on the page that needs editing (not part of the member data base). Then I use my ftp program (CuteFTP) to go into the cgi director and download file members.cgi. I open that file with a text editor and it is full of Perl code but does not contain anything resembling what I saw in the browser or when viewing the source through the browser. The text I need to edit is not there.

How do I find the file that contains the static stuff on the page that I need to edit? There are no .html files in the directory “.cgi”.

Right now I do not know Perl or cgi and have no need to edit any of that code; what I am working on is mostly on .html pages. I may be learning cgi in the future, however.

Thanks.
CE

[webdevjim]

Hey,
It's probably pulling the text out of a file or a database. If the program was written well, they would have stored the data in a seperate file or an sql DB.
I can't teach you perl in a few minutes. But you might try this. Find some unique text in the html page that the .cgi file outputs. Then do a search for files that contain that text. You can then look at the file and make some changes and see if it updates the html output.

/WebDevJim

[ControlEngineer]

I can't teach you perl in a few minutes.

Very true. I don't think anyone can teach me anything in a few minutes--even easy stuff. ;}

I am getting around to reading some Perl and CGI books, but I have been getting around to it for quite some time. My own sites are on servers that don't have (for the price I pay) cgi capability, and what I do can be done in html, so I haven't had a need to learn it--yet.

I will try searching the site for the file that contains the text that I will be editing.

Thanks for the suggestion.

CE