OT: question

[Brian K. White]

On 4/9/2010 5:58 PM, Richard Hane wrote:
> Mark,
>
> Thank you.  I'll give them a try.
>
> I have been on many iis sites but still can not find out where to place the cgi folder.  And is it called cgi-bin or cgi-win.  Pretty simple questions you would think you could find on the Microsoft iis site but alas, no.

The question is probably too simple to answer, meaning the thing you are 
asking about is not as simple as the question, and so the question is 
meaningless, and so there is no correct answer to it.

For instance:
IIS probably does not do cgi at all for any directory until you 
specifically configure it to do so, and so there is no such place or 
directory. And when you do configure IIS to enable cgi, you probably 
have to specify the directory and you make it whatever you want. Name it 
whatever you want, put it wherever you want.
This is in fact the way it is with apache on most linux/bsd/sun/other 
OS's that use apache. It was true for the old netscape http server at 
least as SCO Unix shipped it. And is probably true for just about every 
other (many many) http server out there.

And there is no "it", you can have as many different or as few active 
directories or individual files as you want, named anything, placed 
anywhere. There is really no reason to have a cgi-bin, and there are 
some reasons not-to.
For instance, I have cgi script named "statement.pdf"
The file is not in cgi-bin nor in any other magic active directory. That 
specific file is active, while most of the other files in the same 
directory are plain static content. It is not a pdf file. It's a ksh 
script that creates and outputs pdf data on the fly, preceded by http 
headers including mime-type declaration for pdf. When the browser gets a 
url to that script like "http://server/statement.pdf?query_string_here"
It looks to the browser like it's just downloading a static file named 
statement.pdf.

So for two different reasons there is no answer to the question.

That said:
I just typed "iis cgi" into google and got a page full of perfectly 
reasonable looking links. The very top one answers your question (and 
verifies my guess above about the default install config), so I didn't 
even look at the rest but they all looked just about as reasonable. That 
was not rocket science ninja search-foo skillz.

By default IIS is not even installed, and when installed it starts out 
configured with no "active" services enabled, just static content. You 
have to actively enable cgi, and along the way doing that, you have to 
specify what files & directories will be active and what their names 
will be and where they will be on the real filesystem and what their web 
alias path will be. How exactly you do that configuring is described in 
the article.

-- 
bkw