Jeremy Smyth’s Blog

Another one I couldn’t search up information on, so putting it here for posterity.

I was playing with an elderly blogging platform called Blosxom. It’s really simple to use, although that, combined with its age, means it’s not up to the current status quo. Regardless, I found it fun to play with. Plus, it’s written in Perl, and everything else is PHP these days, so it was a nice novelty.

Now, one of the things it expects (as does the rest of the internet, apparently), is that the CGI file may be treated as an application, folder, or directory on the web. Like this:

http://example.com/blosxom.cgi/2010/06/28#Post

Now, the script itself is the cgi file, a file called blosxom.cgi in the root of my server. As you can see, it looks like a directory in that location, and according to the Internet, that feature should work, passing any “trailing pathname information” (as Apache calls it) to the script via the PATH_INFO environment variable.

Apache didn’t think so.

Now, attempts to google for “apache trailing slashes” or “apache cgi trailing slashes” or anything like that ended up fruitless. It shames me to say I spent over an hour investigating things like ExecCGI, mod-rewrite stuff, and all manner of other things to try to find out why that feature wasn’t working for me.

Eventually, I did what I probably should’ve done an hour before, and looked at the server error logs. Yes, they existed and were visible. I didn’t think that particular host would let me see them — it’s a free host — but I was wrong, and they surprised me yet again.

So, here’s the key: the host had switched off the AcceptPathInfo directive. Ordinarily, that’s left to the handler concerned (CGI, PHP etc.) to decide, which explains the ubiquity of the “on” setting, and the lack of anyone complaining when it’s switched off in various places I looked.

So there you have it, folks. If your CGI scripts don’t work when you have trailing slashes or trailing path info after the script’s name, don’t get lost in RewriteRules – have a look for AcceptPathInfo.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.