The File Submssion System

The submit system is a collection of software which allows instructors to receive files through the World-Wide Web. It was created as a convenient way to receive programming assignments. The instructor uses a command-line program to create web submit forms which look like this one. The student uses the page to send the required programs. These are delivered into a directory in the instructor's home area on the server.

While many instructors receive submissions as email attachments, the web-based submission system has a number of advantages:

Full logging of submission transactions.
When the web interface tells the student that the file has been submitted, it has already been saved on the server. There is no delay or possibility of silent loss at some intermediate mail host.
There is no need to filter (and perhaps fail to filter) submissions out of the regular stream of electronic mail.
There is no need to extract and organize email attachments.
The system rejects submissions with missing files, or containing binary files where text is required.

The submit system is written mostly in perl, with a little C. It was developed on a system using Linux and Apache web server. It should work fine on any Unix-like system with a web server that supports CGI. It requires perl, the CGI.pm perl module, and the md5sum program.

The submit system is released under the Gnu Public License. It may be downloaded from SourceForge here.