Using a question mark is not necessary for CGI

It's not necessary (at least with Apache and Xitami) to have "?" as the CGI parameter delimiter - for example some Wiki clones (Wiki, Twiki, search Freshmeat for it) use some feature of Apache that allows to insert the script in the middle of the url and the rest of the url path passed as the first parameter (like http://www.nowhere.com/view.pl/01/0101/ ). This would trick spiders into crawling your site, but maybe you should consider making a direct submission/update to spiders instead of having them crawling your site. I don't know if this is actually possible, but ebay.de shows up quite up-to-date on google.com.

Comment on Using a question mark is not necessary for CGI

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RE: Using a question mark is not necessary for CGI by Anonymous Monk on May 24, 2000 at 00:14 UTC
The "Trick" in apache is this: Put a perl script in the main directory with a name like "graph" Then in the apache conf do: <Location /graph> SetHandler cgi-script </Location> (You may also have to set "Options ExecCGI" on either the location or the directory it is in) In your perl script, using "use CGI;" of course you can get the path from your $cgi variable like this: use CGI qw(:standard); my $cgi = new CGI; my $path = $cgi->path_info(); If you went to the site "http://x.org/graph/blue/green/fun.gif" then $path would be set to "/blue/green/fun.gif" Now you can split on / and get your args. If you are getting you data from a DB and want cache's out in the world to cache data that rarely changes, send the proper "Expires: ..." header or the "Last-Modified: ..." header. Building your code inline like this and adding the extra headers all you need to do for the caches. I built a cache in front of a site like this and it saved me about 60% of the load on my processor.	[reply]

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RE: Using a question mark is not necessary for CGI
by Anonymous Monk on May 24, 2000 at 00:14 UTC

The "Trick" in apache is this: Put a perl script in the main directory with a name like "graph" Then in the apache conf do: <Location /graph> SetHandler cgi-script </Location> (You may also have to set "Options ExecCGI" on either the location or the directory it is in) In your perl script, using "use CGI;" of course you can get the path from your $cgi variable like this: use CGI qw(:standard); my $cgi = new CGI; my $path = $cgi->path_info(); If you went to the site "http://x.org/graph/blue/green/fun.gif" then $path would be set to "/blue/green/fun.gif" Now you can split on / and get your args. If you are getting you data from a DB and want cache's out in the world to cache data that rarely changes, send the proper "Expires: ..." header or the "Last-Modified: ..." header. Building your code inline like this and adding the extra headers all you need to do for the caches. I built a cache in front of a site like this and it saved me about 60% of the load on my processor.

[reply]