12.3 Extra Path Information


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	Webmaster in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition By Robert Eckstein, Stephen Spainhour
	Table of Contents

	Chapter 12. CGI Overview

In addition to passing query strings, you can pass additional data, known as extra path information , as part of the URL. The server gauges where the CGI program name ends; anything following is deemed "extra" and is stored in the environment variable PATH_INFO. The following line calls a script with extra path information:

 http://some.machine/cgi-bin/display.pl/cgi/cgi_doc.txt

In this example, we use a script with a .pl suffix to make it clear where the CGI program's path ends and the extra path information begins. Everything after display.pl is the extra path. The PATH_TRANSLATED variable is also set, mapping the PATH_INFO to the document root (DOCUMENT_ROOT) directory (e.g., /usr/local/etc/httpd/public/cgi/cgi_doc.txt ).


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