[webmin-devel] PATH_TRANSLATED environment variable in miniserv.pl

[Colm D. <col...@gm...>]

Hi,

I was trying to run a php script I obtained as a CGI using a php4
binary with miniserv.pl but kept running into the "No input file
specified" error message.

After a bit of Googling I found that a common problem withr running
php CGIs in this way is that the SCRIPT_FILENAME enviroment variable
may not have been defined - however I see that this is defined in
miniserv.pl after some discussion of this I found in the archives [1].
 Anyway - that wasn't my problem, just a bit of backgroud.

I traced the C code of the php4 binary when running my php CGI until I
found that it was failing when doing a fstat() on a filename it had
opened which turned out to be a directory and not a file as expected.=20
It turns out it is basing this on the PATH_TRANSLATED environment
variable which miniserv.pl had defined as the same as my document
root.

I had a look at the CGI spec [2] which stated the following for
PATH_TRANSLATED :

  PATH_TRANSLATED is derived by taking any path-info component
  of the request URI (see section 6.1.6), decoding it (see
  section 3.1), parsing it as a URI in its own right, and
  performing any virtual-to-physical translation appropriate to
  map it onto the server's document repository structure. If the
  request URI includes no path-info component, the
  PATH_TRANSLATED metavariable SHOULD NOT be defined.

I found the last bit interesting so I tried editing miniserv.pl to not
define PATH_TRANSLATED and suddenly everything started working.  So -
is it possible that PATH_TRANSLATED is not being defined correctly
here, or iare there cases where it should not be defined as seems to
be being suggested here?

Thanks,
Colm

[1] http://lists.swelltech.com/pipermail/webmin-devel-archive/2002-October/=
000750.html
[2] http://cgi-spec.golux.com/draft-coar-cgi-v11-03.txt