how do I learn about Perl CGI programming?

[Anonymous Monk]

I have seen web apps that work off of one file, say index.pl, in the root that process requests like /path/to/stuff/.

How do they do that?

==Please retitle this post as you wish.==

20050404 Edit by ysth: change title from: How do they do that?

[merlyn]

See my "Using PATH_INFO as your full docroot (was Re: Sending data to browser's URI field via POST)".

[matthewb]

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.

[tlm]

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.

[ambs]

Didn't understand quite well your idea. But, you have at $ENV{PATH_INFO} the path not processed by Apache. So, if you have the CGI at /foo, when you call /foo/bar the value of that hash position have /bar.

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

[merlyn]

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

[Anonymous Monk]

I think mod_rewrite was what i was looking for. Thanks.