If your admin will not allow you to use the exec version of SSIs (many will not due to security implications), you can make the CGI script your home page. Also, you can use a meta tag to redirect the user to a CGI script. While SSI is a great lightweight alternative, you will get more control just by having the CGI script create the entire page.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://www.yoursite.com/newp
+age.htm" />
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Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.
Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

On the chance that you phrased your question a bit too narrowly, I'll answer the broader question "Is it possible to invoke a CGI script instead of index.html?"

Yes. Details for how to do this depend on what web server you're using. Apache and IIS can both be configured with a list of names to try to figure out how to handle   http://www.example.com/ index.cgi can be on that list. Assuming you've also configured the web server to execute CGIs, index.cgi will get invoked no other file on the list is found first.

With Apache, you can arrange, on a per-directly basis, to have .html mean CGI. Consult the Apache docs.

If your webserver supports it, yes. Apache has Server Side Includes (SSI), which allow you to have html comments that the server replaces with real content, by doing something like this:

<!--#exec script="myscript.cgi" -->
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But this really isn't a perl question, so if you aren't using Apache, or this doesn't help, you should really ask in a forum related to your web server software.

TIMTOWTDI. Do you have SSI available? Enable them for your index.html and use some 'exec cgi' command. Or just make index.html a Perl Program and tell the webserver it is one. Do you have a possibility like mod_rewrite? Just rewrite index.html to whatever script URI you want.

You see, this is more a problem of how to configure your server, not neccesarily a Perl problem. Anyways, I'm sure the Perlmonks can help you if you tell us what webserver you're using.

I am using Apache server.

That's good. The documentation is available online ;)

It's likely that Ovid is right and you cannot configure anything at all, but if you can, I think the following will be configurable as it is no danger for the server.

# .htaccess file
<Files index.html>
  SetHandler cgi-script
</File>
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Now you can simply put a Perl Script in "index.html" and it will work.

If you only want it to be index.html because it is the directory index, there's a better method:

DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.pl
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You don't need any index.html now, just create index.cgi (or index.pl if you like) and it will be directory index.

--
http://fruiture.de