Name

ScriptAlias

Synopsis

                  ScriptAlias URLpath CGIpath
Server config, virtual host

The ScriptAlias directive does two things. It sets Apache up to execute CGI scripts, and it converts requests for URLs starting with URLpathto execution of the script in CGIpath. For example:

ScriptAlias /bin /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin

An incoming URL like www.butterthlies.com/bin/fred will run the script /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/fred. Note that CGIpath must be an absolute path, starting at /.

A very useful feature of ScriptAlias is that the incoming URL can be loaded with fake subdirectories. Thus, the incoming URL www.butterthlies.com/bin/fred/purchase/learjetwill run .../fred as before, but will also make the text purchase/learjet available to fred in the environment variable PATH_INFO. In this way you can write a single script to handle a multitude of different requests. You just need to monitor the command-line arguments at the top and dispatch the requests to different subroutines.

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