CGI PATH_TRANSLATED variable?

I ran into this when I wrote user-cgi, and hand-waved my way through
it. The documentation on PATH_TRANSLATED on hoohoo is vague. The link
to CGI information on w3.www.org is to hoohoo.  Now I've got a server
working (you can watch it at http://www.phone.net/, and read the draft
docs at http://www.phone.net/aws/) and need to get things clarified.

Anyone want to try to explain what the "translate version of
PATH_INFO" should be? I know, it does any "virtual-to-physical"
mapping, but what does that MEAN? After all, any server I've run that
has cgi scripts has two mappings - one takes /cgi-bin to a set of
programs to be run (so, if I get /cgi-bin as the prefix of PATH_INFO,
I should run the program???), and one that takes other files to a
directory. Most of them have many such mappings.

The server I'm building allows multiple virtual-to-physical mappings.
One always returns a 204 result, no matter what the rest of the URL
is. Even worse, it allows for multiple mappings of the same URL. I.e.
- it will look in multiple trees for a file designated by a given URL,
and if it fails to find all of those it could wind up returning a 204
because it got passed to 204-returning map.

So, could someone please enlighten me as to what I should be doing
with PATH_TRANSLATED? Better yet, could someone give me an example of
it being used, or the justificatoin that went into it being included
in the spec?

	Thanx,
	<mike

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 1995 20:08:28 UTC