[8857] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: a test result
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lilley)
Wed Aug 9 12:08:09 1995
From: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
To: sjk@amazon.com (Shel Kaphan)
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 1995 17:05:11 +0100 (BST)
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <199508081537.IAA18360@bert.amazon.com> from "Shel Kaphan" at Aug 8, 95 08:37:25 am
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Shel Kaphan said:
>
> As it turns out, using the NCSA server (v 1.3) there is apparently no
> way for a CGI program to return the Location header with a 2xx status.
First, that statement is untrue. Secondly, this is a feature not a bug.
> If you generate a Location header, the server forces 302 status.
Yes. That is what outputting the string Location: is supposed to do; it
lets you issue a redirect from a program, without the hassle of creating
all your own headers yourself.
> Sounds like a patch is needed. (maybe there are newer versions that
> already have this fixed?)
No, and no. Suppose this was patched. How would you ever issue a redirect?
You would have to generate all your own headers. Imagemap would stop
working. Etc.
So here is the impossible program. As you can see it is not complicated:
======== begin nph-loc ========
#!/bin/sh
echo "HTTP 200 Hunky dory"
echo "Server: NCSA 1.3 via nph script"
echo "Location: http://some/location"
echo "MIME-version: 1.0"
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo
echo "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN//2.0\">"
echo "<html><head><title>refute</title></head><body><p>"
echo "Hi there</p></body></html>
========== end nph-loc ===========
Save this out into your cgi-bin as nph-loc, telnet to your server and try it:
telnet info 80
Trying...
Connected to info.mcc.ac.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /cgi-bin/nph-loc HTTP/1.0
HTTP 200 Hunky dory
Server: NCSA 1.3 via nph script
Location: http://some/location
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN//2.0">
<html><head><title>refute</title></head><body><p>
Hi there</body</html>
So, you have a location header and a 200 status. The client will of
course do nothing with the Location header, because the status is not
300 series.
Happy now? ;-)
--
Chris Lilley, Technical Author
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