in reply to what to use create, .html or .cgi

If necessary, you can pass parameters to a CGI script so that the URL looks "normal". For example: http://www.mysite.com/myscript/param/and/more/params where myscript is your script and everything following it is a sequence of parameters.

The trick is that everything beyond the script name gets stored in an environment variable called PATH_INFO. So you could then do something like this: my ($this, $that, $the, $other) = split '/',$ENV{PATH_INFO}; Just because it looks like a normal path to the user (and presumably to search engines) doesn't mean your code has to interpret it as such.

I should mention that, while I know this technique works on Apache, I'm not certain it's a universal capability.

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Re: Re: what to use create, .html or .cgi
by andrew (Acolyte) on Sep 27, 2002 at 18:46 UTC
    I honestly dont get wut u mean here how is myscript a script its a folder????
[reply]
      Think of the URL less literally as a directory path, and more as a string that gets passed to the Web server to tell it where to look for a file to serve.

      Let's say you have a server whose docroot is at ~myname/httpd. This server is visible at the URL http://www.mysite.com.

      Now any file you put into ~myname/httpd, say ~myname/httpd/contact_me.html, is available through the Web server -- in this case as http://www.mysite.com/contact_me.html.

      That file doesn't have to be an HTML document; it could also be a script. Save a simple CGI script in the docroot as test.pl and you can now run it by visiting http://www.mysite.com/test.pl. (Maybe; see footnote below.)

      You can append even more information to the URL, like http://www.mysite.com/test.pl/12345, and this will still run test.pl with 12345 in $ENV{PATH_INFO}.

      Is any of this really necessary for your particular application? I don't really have enough information to say. But it is an alternative to the question-mark way of passing CGI params.

      Footnote: Depending on your server configuration, you might not actually be able to execute arbitrarily-named programs from arbitrary directories. So you might actually have to do something like http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/myprog.cgi/more/params/go/here.

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