-- Ryan Dagey [mobile] On Jan 30, 2013, at 2:19 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu&gt; wrote: Thanks for the reply. We are simply running gretlcli from within php which should execute as apache user. Now this user has no home directory, so if that causes gretlcli to default to root directory, I don't know the inner workings of gretlcli. We are not doing anything regarding the root user. Why is gretlcli requiring any user directories at all? I don't understand what is derived from these directories. It would be good if this is the case to review some documentation on the required directories, I did a lot of googling looking for them. Am I understanding that all of those environment variables have to be set every time in PHP to some temporary directory just to get gretlcli to run in PHP under the apache user? There is no way to tell gretlcli to use some set of defaults? I would think calling the gretlcli directly would imply not wanting to use user preferences, especially when running batch that the docs say are designed for programmed usage. How would the gretl home change based on user pref anyway? I checked my home directory that I tested the gretl commands and there is no .gretl2rc. Would it be somewhere else? I will run a test with the environment variables you specify. Did this change from a prior version? Maybe we could get that version installed if this does not help.

On Jan 30, 2013, at 3:45 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu&gt; wrote: Thanks for getting back with me. I don't know how apache works but it might be possible HOME is not set at all, what would gretl do in this case? Is there a way to pass config data to gretl on the command line? I could create an alias in that case. Or is there a global config that I could setup for gretl to use in these cases? In etc maybe? I can say now we are only interested in gretl's individual power, but it could change later. I do know we will never care about x11, it's a server environment, so it would still be a limited use configuration. Regardless, gretl is awesome, we do inventory and production forecasting with it and now I'm implementing a job times regression analysis, trend line, etc. Much better to use gretl than PHP that function out.

I think that we are going for a most complicated solution. I my scripting I usually create a shell script that calls my commands after doing some setups. (I have not done experimentation with gretlcli, but in general) In your case, I would create a shell script, say gretl_caller.sh, containing: # Setup required environment vars HOME=/tmp export HOME # Call gretlcli with eventual arguments (assuming path for gretlcli) /usr/local/bin/gretlcli $* So instead Apache call gretlcli, it would call gretl_caller.sh. What you think about this solution? Hélio On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu&gt; wrote:

exposed [>] I did some more testing. First, setting up the GRETL_HOME env var made no change in the result, but I have some more info to go on. I did get gretl to show me all the output, and the strange thing is that it's exactly as it should be. I don't understand the entries in the php_error_log about "gretldir is maybe...", but the gretlcli output is exactly the same as when run in a normal shell. However, the result file is never created, despite the output being correct. I'm attaching below the sample output that shows the environment variables I set via PHP putenv call and the output of the gretlcli call. The calculations seem sound, the only issue is that the result file is not created. I've changed over the working directory (which I already tested with full permissions) to the /tmp directory, so we can rule out a permissions issue. It's almost like gretl simply cannot write to any file, though it appears to be trying. Any thoughts on what we are doing wrong would be greatly appreciated. Below is the output (first lines are getenv PHP calls to confirm env var setup, the last line is the return variable of the gretlcli call from the exec function parameter). The problem is that the file /tmp/resultsFile74270470 is never created. Also I tested without the call to output to this file, and the entries in the PHP error log still appear regardless. I did notice that the .gretl/gretl directories in the temporary apache home directory have an updated timestamp from when I copied them over yesterday. That tells me that gretl is accessing these directories, so that seems to be working as intended. Yet we still get the entries in the PHP log and the result file is not created. Maybe someone can shed some light on this behavior? Below the browser output, I show the permissions on /tmp and /tmp/apache (including contents of the latter). BROWSER OUTPUT: HOME: /tmp/apache/ GRETL_HOME: /usr/share/gretl/ **** gretl output **** gretl output: gretl version 1.9.11 Copyright Ramu Ramanathan, Allin Cottrell and Riccardo "Jack" Lucchetti This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Current session: 2013-01-30 20:37 ? run /tmp/commandFile74270470 /tmp/commandFile74270470 ? open /tmp/dataFile74270470.csv parsing /tmp/dataFile74270470.csv... using delimiter ',' longest line: 21 characters first field: 'pHours' number of columns = 2 number of variables: 2 number of non-blank lines: 112 scanning for variable names... line: pHours,period scanning for row labels and data... treating these as undated data Listing 3 variables: 0) const 1) pHours 2) period ? ols pHours const period Model 1: OLS, using observations 1-111 Dependent variable: pHours coefficient std. error t-ratio p-value -------------------------------------------------------- const 4.16542 0.0781421 53.31 6.62e-80 *** period -0.00365263 0.00122763 -2.975 0.0036 *** Mean dependent var 3.964522 S.D. dependent var 0.428961 Sum squared resid 18.72043 S.E. of regression 0.414424 R-squared 0.075117 Adjusted R-squared 0.066631 F(1, 109) 8.852685 P-value(F) 0.003605 Log-likelihood -58.71691 Akaike criterion 121.4338 Schwarz criterion 126.8529 Hannan-Quinn 123.6322 ? outfile /tmp/resultsFile74270470 --append Now appending output to '/tmp/resultsFile74270470' Closed output file '/tmp/resultsFile74270470' ? exit Done **** end gretl output **** returrned: 1 Here are the permissions on /tmp: # ls -la /tmp/ total 184 drwxrwxrwt 5 apache apache 143360 Jan 30 20:38 . drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Jan 30 20:00 .. Here is the structure of the /tmp/apache to show we copied the home dir files from a working user: # ls -la /tmp/apache/ total 156 drwxrwxrwx 4 apache apache 4096 Jan 29 21:29 . drwxrwxrwt 5 apache apache 143360 Jan 30 20:47 .. drwxrwxrwx 5 apache apache 4096 Jan 30 20:37 .gretl drwxrwxrwx 2 apache apache 4096 Jan 30 20:37 gretl -- Ryan Dagey

Just to say that Allin is the BEST !!! (not tested the feature, but recognizing his commitment to this project) Thanks, Hélio

Please [>] I apologize for the prior message, I did some rechecking and discovered I had forgotten to update the userdir in the gretl config. Everything works now! I will probably be asking for assistance on the actual functions in gretl, but I will try to work it out on my own and make a new thread if necessary. Thanks for all your help.