When I asked the question can javascript list files on the server, everyone answered with "javascript cannot access server filesystem because it is a client-side scripting language". But I thought that answer is only partially true, because browser can list the contents of the server directory if dirlisting is enabled. So, I decided to try to parse that output - no need to use cgi when you can already see the data you need in xml format. So here is what I did:
I am using lighttpd, and important entries in lighttpd.conf are:
dir-listing.activate = "enable" #enables directory listing
dir-listing.auto-layout = "disable" #simplifies the list style
mimetype.assign = ( ".xml" => "text/xml" ) #deals with xmls
test.xml used to test XHR looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<anchors>
<a>foo</a>
<a>bar</a>
</anchors>
Directory listing page, created by lighttpd mod_dirlisting.so:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<h2>Index of /directory/</h2>
<div class="list">
<table summary="Directory Listing" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<thead><tr><th class="n">Name</th><th class="m">Last Modified</th><th class="s">Size</th><th class="t">Type</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td class="n"><a href="../">Parent Directory</a>/</td><td class="m"> </td><td class="s">- </td><td class="t">Directory</td></tr>
<tr><td class="n"><a href="foo">foo</a></td><td class="m">2015-Jan-03 13:24:12</td><td class="s">39.4K</td><td class="t">application/octet-stream</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
test.html page used to create XHR:
<html><head></head><body><script>
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
else var request = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');
request.open('post', 'test.xml', true);
request.send();
if (request) request.onreadystatechange = function() alert(request.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('a')[1].childNodes[0].nodeValue);
</script></body></html>
All of which work fine (you get 'foo' in an alert box), but when I request.open directory instead of xml, I get nothing, not even in error console.
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