An Introduction to CGI - The Common Gateway Interface

Extra Path Information

In addition to the name/value pairs that may be passed to the gateway program, additional input called extra path information may be passed to the program. This extra path information can be used any way you see fit. It can be retrieved via two environment variables, PATH_INFO and PATH_TRANSLATED. PATH_INFO contains the relative path that is passed to the program; PATH_TRANSLATED is the actual full system path expanded from the relative path given in PATH_INFO. The user can add path information to a call to your gateway program by adding a slash and the path (relative to the document) after the program name and any name/value pairs. Here's an example:
http://domain.com/program.cgi?name=value/docs/file
In this example, "docs/file" is the extra path information. Extra path information is not encoded in any way.

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