Re: [Phpwiki-talk] ORIG_PATH_INFO instead of PATH_INFO

[Whit B. <wh...@tr...>]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 12:50:04AM +0200, Oliver Betz wrote:

> http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=21575 and 
> http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=23800 mention it. Strange that the 
> search function doesn't find both...

Eh. I was using php.net's link to the Google search that gave:

"Your search - ORIG_PATH_INFO site:www.php.net - did not match any
documents." 

- but of course that's not searching bugs.php.net. 

> It can be configured (cgi.fix_pathinfo in php.ini), but I'm not sure 
> whether it is a bug or intended behaviour, so I can't tell my web 
> hoster to change it.
> 
> Any comments?

The PHP manual seems to be totally lacking on this. However there's a
comment in php.ini about it:

; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI.  PHP's
; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not grok 
; what PATH_INFO is.  For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs.  Setting
; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix it's paths to conform to the spec.  A setting 
; of zero causes PHP to behave as before.  Default is zero.  You should fix your scripts
; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED.
; cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

So it looks like your host is running PHP as a CGI, and that in CGI mode PHP
formerly didn't really have access to PATH_INFO so it just wasn't provided
(it was available in the more usual mode of running PHP as an Apache
module). However, the related PATH_TRANSLATED was kludged to copy the
available SCRIPT_FILENAME value. Then this was fixed for one version of PHP,
but that broke scripts expecting to find that kludged value or
SCRIPT_FILENAME, so php.ini was set to have cgi.fix_pathinfo=0 - which
breaks things for you because you need the fix to be ther for the PATH_INFO
variable. So ... your provider can change to cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 (removing
that ";" before it) in php.ini, and you'll be good - but anyone else on the
system using PATH_TRANSLATED in a script (this could be grepped for) needs
to change to SCRIPT_FILENAME or their script will then be broken.

Whit

PS: Reini is of course right on the "SERVER_" stuff - I'm don't always run
in safe mode (too many old, old scripts).