remote execute program

[Cecil Ward]

I am wanting to write a short program (on a ‘server’ you could 
say) that takes a command, runs it (as on the command line, so an 
executable with arguments or a shell command) and returns a 
3-tuple with an int for the return code, plus the textual outputs 
that it generates to stdout and stderr. I can see a number of 
suitable routines in the D runtime libraries, which are already 
D-ified to save me a some trouble mindlessly converting code from 
C.

Where I could do with some help is as follows: I'm needing to 
send the commands to a remote box using http has to be used 
because the local-end program (on an iPad) that I have to 
interfacing to can only speak http/https, and can not handle just 
a straight eg TCP connection. Despite the overheads from using 
http, if I can employ gzip compression on the link then that will 
be a big gain.

Could anyone give me some general pointers for where to look?

The server box is a linux machine. I'm a very experienced 
professional C programmer but amazingly have never done anything 
with *nix in general or http-related C libraries.


I asked a question in this forum earlier about general low-level 
networking, but now this requirement has come up that mandates 
the use of very simple http and needs only synchronous 
operations. The impressive framework that is vibe.d has already 
been mentioned, but the amount of reading matter is rather 
daunting.

A simple D example of an http transaction would be very helpful.