Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

10.1. File Size

The fsize command allows you to report the size of a file inside a document. The file size.shtml is as follows:

<!--#config errmsg="Bungled again!"-->
<!--#config sizefmt="bytes"-->
The size of this file is <!--#fsize file="size.shtml"--> bytes.
The size of another_file is <!--#fsize file="another_file"--> bytes.

The first line provides an error message. The second line means that the size of any files is reported in bytes printed as a number, for instance, 89. Changing bytes to abbrev gets the size in kilobytes, printed as 1k. The third line prints the size of size.shtml itself; the fourth line prints the size of another_file. You can't comment out lines with the "# " character since it just prints, and the following command is parsed straight away. config commands must come above commands that might want to use them.

You can replace the word file= in this script, and in those which follow, with virtual=, which gives a %-encoded URL path relative to the current document being parsed. If it does not begin with a slash, it is taken to be relative to the current document.

If you play with this stuff, you find that Apache is picky about the syntax. For instance, trailing spaces cause an error:

The size of this file is <!--#fsize file="size.shtml   "--> bytes.
The size of this file is Bungled again! bytes

If we had not used the errmsg command, we would see the following:

...[an error occurred while processing this directive]...