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

[Jamie C. <jca...@we...>]

On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 14:56, Colm Dougan wrote:
> 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. 
> 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?

Hi Colm,
Thanks for pointing this out - this is definately a bug in Webmin, as it
shouldn't even be setting PATH_TRANSLATED unless there is PATH_INFO
data. Worse still, it was being set wrongly anyway!

I never noticed this before, because none of the CGI programs in Webmin
make use of it ..

 - Jamie