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The cgiutils program

The cgiutils program is a standard CERN server utility used to create a set of valid HTTP headers as part of the script's required output. If no argument or an invalid argument is given, cgiutils will print a terse summary of its command line options. The valid options are:

-nodate

Suppresses the output of a Date header field.

-noel

Suppress the blank line after the headers (no empty line).

-status nn

Generates a full HTTP version 1.0 response including a status line, MIME version field, and Date field (unless the -nodate option was specified).

-expires when

Generates an Expires header field. The value when can be the keyword now, or can contain a number which, if unqualified, is interpreted as seconds. Keywords can be appended to numbers to specify different units of time, for example:

    cgiutils -expires '3 months 12 hours'

-ct type/subtype

Generate a Content-Type header field.

-ce encoding

Generate a Content-Encoding and a Content-transfer-encoding header field.

-length nn

Generate a Content-Length field.  

A Server header field is printed with the values of the SERVER_SOFTWARE CGI environment variable.

For example, executing the following command line:

    cgiutils -status 200 -ct text/plain -expires now

from a script invoked from the CERN server will generate the following headers:

  HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Server: CERN/3.0
  Date: Monday, 14-Nov-94 18:11:51 GMT
  Content-Type: text/plain
  Expires: Monday, 14-Nov-94 18:11:51 GMT

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.