web status display for long running program

[Michele Simionato]

This is fun, so I will give my solution too (of course,
the effort here is to give the shortest solution, not the
more robust solution ;).

This is the server program, which just counts forever:

from threading import Thread
from CGIHTTPServer import test
import os

class Counter(Thread):
    def run(self):
        n = 0
        self.loop = True
        while self.loop:
            n += 1
            os.environ["COUNTER"] = str(n)
    def stop(self):
        self.loop = False


if __name__ == "__main__":
    counter = Counter()
    counter.start()
    try:
        test()
    finally: # for instance, if CTRL-C is called
        counter.stop()

And this is the CGI viewer:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
print "Content-type: text/plain\n"
print "Counter: %s" % os.environ["COUNTER"]

Pretty bare-bone ;)

             Michele Simionato