Question

I am trying to get a header that will work with Apache, IIS 6, and IIS 7. I won’t go into the reason for that here. Let’s just say that it’s not as easy as I thought it would be 🙂

Anyway, the problem has something to do with NPH. In our code (originally written for IIS 6) we have

use CGI qw(:standard);  print 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n';  print header; 

at the top of every cgi script; I read that this is how you tell IIS that you want NPH.

Apache uses the filename to see if the output is nph (nph- must be the beginning of the filename) so what I did (which works in both IIS 6 and Apache) is the following:

use CGI qw(:standard); print header('text/html', '200 OK'); 

IIS 7, interestingly, seems to require NPH, so if I don’t either do

use CGI qw(:standard -nph); 

or

print 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n';  print header('text/html', '200 OK'); #parameters are apparently optional  

the browser tries to do something weird with the file, since it doesn’t get the mimetype.

Also note: IIS 6 and 7 are ok without printing any header at all, but Apache doesn’t like that.

Anyway, the best thing right now would be to make

use CGI qw(:standard); print header('text/html', '200 OK'); 

somehow work in IIS 7. Does anyone know how I can do that? I don’t know all the details for our server configuration, but if you tell me how to get any details you might need, I can do that.

Thanks either way!

Answer 1

Brian (and others) have told me to write a subroutine that would Do The Right Thing. Hope this helps someone else!

sub header {     return (($ENV{PERLXS})?'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n':'').CGI->header(@_); }