Re: CGI, semicolons, and so on...
Tony Sanders (sanders@BSDI.COM)
Tue, 04 Jan 1994 10:26:20 -0600
> as a virtue in its own right; although it doesn't seem necessary to
> make it possible for users to tell that a script is running instead
> of a file being served, I don't understand why it's important to hide
> that fact from them.
The problem is that if you are already serving
a large tree of documents, e.g.:
http://server/man/1/ls
http://server/man/1/cat
and you wish to insert a script somewhere (to add searching or virtuality).
You are screwed if you must change all references (e.g., documents on
other servers that you don't own, many of which you probably don't even
know exist) to your documents because there is some special convention
for running a script that requires a change in the URL.
The current scheme will work on ANY platform. The CGI spec doesn't say
anything about how the server should decide what is what. Plexus uses
a config file to determine this, and doesn't require any stat()'s or
execute bits, any platform could do this, even MACs.
--sanders