Update: Thanks great merlyn for correcting me the key name.

I think you mean PATH_INFO (yeah, bad name for it), not EXTRA_PATH.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

I don't know how it's done in other server/OS configurations, but with Apache/Unix, the CGI script can inspect the environment variable DOCUMENT_ROOT to get a physical path. From there one can get a physical path to /path/to/stuff as /path/to/docroot/path/to/stuff.

I'm not sure that everyone else is following what you're talking about but it may be me so apologies if so.

You can access the query string with $cgi_object->self_url(), split it on the forward-slash into an array, shift off the sections and get your script to respond based on what they contain. An example of this procedure can be found in the source of Maypole (look at the parse_path() method.

If, for whatever reason, you just want to set up a simple web app that works this way to see how you get on, you might find CGI::Application::Dispatch useful; it loads CGI::Application modules and runs their so-called `run-modes' according to the path in the query string.