DOC_antiword.pm has a problem with hosted webserver

Extensive debugging in IRC with MTempest has shown that the antiword program (to index DOC files) is called from DOC_antiword.pm in a way which gives an error on a hosted webserver.

Although all other handlers indexed OK, DOCs wouldn't at all.

Debugging showed the following message being returned from Antiword when called from the indexing routine:-

"I can't find the name of your HOME directory I can't open your mapping file (8859-1.txt) It is not in '/.antiword' nor in '/usr/share/antiword'. "

From the IRC chat:----

<MTempest> Antiword looks for its mapping files in three directories, in the order given:
<MTempest> (1) The directory specified by $ANTIWORDHOME
<MTempest> (2) The directory specified by $HOME/.antiword
<MTempest> (3) Directory /usr/share/antiword
<MTempest> Ideally, you need to set the ANTIWORDHOME environment variable when running antiword.

On a hosted server if antiword is not installed in the main server, it will require installation by each user into their home directrory (e.g. /home/mydomain/.antiword and /home/mydomain/bin), not the root directory of the server. Without the $ANTIWORDHOME being available/passed to antiword from the DOC_antiword.pm, the program fails and returns an empty string as the indexed value.

MTempest instructed me to change the line highlighted above to at least get antiword running in my environment:

my $output = "".`ANTIWORDHOME=/home/mydomain/.antiword $antiword $file 2>&1`;
my $exit = 0;

This now works as expected on the hosted server. However, there must be a more robust method in using the SYSCommand calling method to pass the $ANTIWORDHOME parameter in the environment.

---

The environment of the calling process is passed on to any subprocess invoked by any of the methods used in Sandbox.pm. So, you have a couple of choices:

1. $ENV{ANTIWORDHOME}='/home/mydomain/.antiword'; somewhere in the perl
2. Use Apache mod_env to set the environment variable

I don't know if this is intended to be portable, but on a linux server I would personally use the approach suggested by Michael, but I would pass in the value of $cmd from a configuration variable e.g. $Foswiki::cfg{Extensions}{KinoSearchContrib}{AntiwordCommand} = '...'

-- CrawfordCurrie - 06 Sep 2010

This needs updating for the latest version of Stringifier Plugin. THe above instructions do not apply to the latest DOC_antiword.pm file.

-- BobCorless - 12 Nov 2010

Afaict, the new DOC_antiword.pm implemented CDot's suggestion, so you should be able to do it via configure, in the Extensions tab, in StringifierContrig, you should have a setting called antiwordCmd. Simply update that to have /usr/bin/env ANTIWORDHOME=/home/mydomain/.antiword .... The ... being the part that's already there, which should be the path to your antiword.

-- OlivierRaginel - 12 Nov 2010