Generally, I think it's a good idea for Perl programs (or, indeed, any programs) not to have an extension. Why should your users know or care what language a program is written in.

Your last example wouldn't work without some kind of mod_rewrite magic, but something that I've used successfully in the past is to create directories containing an index.cgi so you can use URLs like:

http://www.domain.com/acme/login/?mode=new
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You don't need mod_rewrite for that. You could use <Files> or <Location> directives; the latter are more flexible but only work in the main httpd.conf, while the former can be dropped into a .htaccess.

Makeshifts last the longest.

davorg, thanks for this example. I have seen URL's like this, but could not figure out how it worked. However, I'm still not sure of the mechanics.

I assume that the index.cgi is in the directory "login" in your example, but does the lone "?" fire the cgi without the need of a program name, as in: /login/index.cgi?mode=new. I.e., the "index.cgi" is not needed, right?

This is the first time I've been exposed to mod_rewrite and have done some Super Searching and found this by Mad Hatter. Would something like this work with your example?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /subDir/
# only redirect if the file requested isn't index.cgi
# capture anything else and redirect it to index.cgi
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^index.cgi
RewriteRule ^(.+)/?$ index.cgi?rm=$1 [L]
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Well, I'll try this to see if it works differently or better than my usual .htaccess:

Options +ExecCGI
SetHandler cgi-script
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—Brad
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up. " G. K. Chesterton

You are over thinking it. url.tld/foo/bar/, in apache, attempts to open whatever the default page for a folder is. In most installs of apache, url.tld/foo/bar/ resolves to url.tld/foo/bar/index.html However, you can change which file extensions you want the index page to use, for example, change it to .pl or .cgi. Then url.tld/foo/bar/ resolves to url.tld/foo/bar/index.pl and anything after the question mark is passed to that cgi. You'll notice perlmonks does something similar. The default page is index.pl so perlmonks.org resolves to perlmonks.org/index.pl so perlmonks.org?foo=bar resolves to perlmonks.org/index.pl?foo=bar

Let's see how do it with mod_perl (example from mod_perl documentation):
This is an URL on website -

http://example.com/news/20021031/09/index.html
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http://example.com/perl/news.pl?date=20021031&id=09&page=index.html
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package MyApache::RewriteURI;
  
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  
  use Apache::RequestRec ();
  
  use Apache::Const -compile => qw(DECLINED);
  
  sub handler {
      my $r = shift;
  
      my($date, $id, $page) = $r->uri =~ m|^/news/(\d+)/(\d+)/(.*)|;
      $r->uri("/perl/news.pl");
      $r->args("date=$date&id=$id&page=$page");
  
      return Apache::DECLINED;
  }
  1;
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PerlTransHandler +MyApache::RewriteURI
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Ah... I see! But I only have limited control over my webserver, that's what I get for being a cheapskate...

No no not all - it just depends on the configuration of the webserver, of course if you are on windows which depends on the extension to know what to do with the file then you are a bit stuck, short of some ISAPI filter magic or creating some completely different extension, but with , say Apache, this is common practice - of course if you are using mod_perl the thing in the 'file' position at the end of the url may not actually be a physical resource at all.

/J\

Yeah. Use mod_rewrite.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg