[cs631apue] About CGI Response Headers.
Jan Schaumann
jschauma at stevens.edu
Tue Dec 11 22:14:33 EST 2012
byu1 <byu1 at stevens.edu> wrote:
> For the CGI Response, what kind of headers should we return? Are they
> the same as GET/HEAD, such as
> Date/Server/Last-Modified/Content-Type/Content-Length?
Since the server is not actually generating the response, it does not
return the Content-Type, nor Content-Length headers. In fact, the
server can't know these -- it's the responsibility of the CGI to
generate these headers. (In fact, when you write a cgi program and
neglect to generate a Content-Type header, a normal web server will
generate a 500 Internal Server Error.)
RFC3875 states that the CGI program should return a status header, but
in practice CGIs rarely do. For this reason, web servers generally
assume a status of 200 if the CGI does not generate its own status.
To make your lifes easier, let's say that your server should generate:
- status code
- Date
- Server
and let the CGI generate the Content-Type and Content-Length headers.
-Jan
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