redirect

Drupal form FAQ: How do I redirect a user when they submit a form, and I'm writing a hook_form_alter function to alter that form?

In Drupal 6 you set the "$form['#redirect']" property in your hook_form_alter function when you alter the form, like this:

$form['#redirect'] = 'thank-you';

That syntax tells Drupal to redirect the user to the "/thank-you" URI on your website.

Here's the source code for a full hook_form_alter function I just pulled from a working Drupal module:

Last night I spent some time going through my Google Webmaster's account, and found a listing of a large number of links I had broken on this website, largely because I removed the old, stale "directory" I had on this site. That was a Yahoo-style phonebook directory that made sense in 1999, but doesn't make much sense in 2011.

Unix/Linux redirection FAQ: How do I redirect Unix STDOUT and STDERR to the same file with one command?

To redirect both STDOUT and STDERR to the same file with one Unix/Linux command, use this syntax:

my-shell-script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

As you can see in this command, I'm redirecting STDOUT to /dev/null as normal, and then the special 2>&1 syntax tells your Bash shell to redirect STDERR to STDOUT (which is already pointing to /dev/null).

Perl CGI redirect FAQ: Can you share some Perl CGI redirect example code?

Here's the source code for a simple Perl CGI redirect example. An HTML redirect is pretty easy to program manually, but the Perl CGI.pm module makes it even easier to redirect a user from one page to another.

Perl redirect CGI script example

Here's the source code for this Perl CGI redirect example script:

Note: This approach is very old; Java/JSP scriptlets were deprecated a long time ago. I don't have time to update this article to the correct, modern approach, but I hope this JSP session example will point you in the right direction.

Every once in a while I'm asked something like, "How can I tell if I have a valid user session in my JSP code?"