Execute Bash script on Ubuntu from remote Windows machine?

Question

I have a bash script on a ubuntu 10.4 machine. It is shared and I can access it from my win7 machine with \\LINUX-SERVER\bash_repo\make-live

However when I do, windows tries to open it. This is not what I want. I want to tell ubuntu to execute it.

I am actually hoping to be able to build a GUI app on windows where the user clicks a button and it tells the bash script on the ubuntu machine to execute.

Is any of this possible?

Answer 1

Have you tried plink from the makers of PuTTY? http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

You should be able to run the script on the ubuntu machine like:

plink.exe -ssh -pw pass -noagent user@linux-server /path/to/your/script/make-live

Answer 2

As others have suggested you could use ssh to get a CLI session or wrap it in an accessible program, however that you can access it as a network share implies that Samba is configured and running - and there are numerous ways of getting Samba to execute files (e.g. magic script, winpopups, svcctl) rtfm for more details.

Answer 3

As suggested by my comment above, you can execute your script from PHP if you have a web server running on your ubuntu machine.

A small PHP script like the following will be enough:

<?php
$output = shell_exec('bash /path/to/your/script');
echo "$output";
?>

Save the PHP code in a file such as /var/www/exec.php and point your browser from any machine to the URL http://your_ubuntu_machine_ip/exec.php.

Please, note that the script will be executed as www-data user (the default apache web server user). If you want to run a privileged command using sudo, you need to add www-data user to sudoers file using visudo.

You need an entry like:

www-data   ALL=NOPASSWD: /path/to/command