I've got a bunch of programs that handle a website I'm working on, one of which is a main "server" program. It basically gets a single parameter: page location (for example: http://.../serve.pl?page=/perl/index.html). This works very nicely. This script "builds" the page (that is, /perl/index.html wouldn't have title html, the navigation stuff, etc; it's just the guts of that particular page).

The problem here is that in order for my page to actually display properly - title image, nav bar, etc - each page that is to be viewed gets run through this script. The problem arises that now every internal link has to change from "<a href="/index.html">" to "<a href="/serve.pl?page=/index.html">".

I've got a decent version working, but I'm wondering if Perl (or heck, even UNIX/Linux for that matter) provides some way of reducing paths. By this, I mean if I get a link that points to "../programs/blah.cgi" in, say, "/computing/perl/index.html", it will be smart enough to figure out the absolute path -- in this case, "/computing/programs/blah.cgi" -- rather than nested relative paths -- "/computing/programs/../perl/blah.cgi".

It's basically a matter of beautifying HTML through Perl. If the link were a directory, I could simply run a system call like:

$dir = `cd $some_link; pwd`;
chomp($dir);

[download]

(Knowing what to remove from the front of the new $dir variable, such as /usr/local/apache/htdocs/.)

Any thoughts?

In reply to Minimizing paths? by Anonymous Monk

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