Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Okay, some things in Ubuntu are great, but others are a little on the quirky side. I say this because they do some things completely different than most other distros, which is probably a good thing, but me coming from experience with two other distros, it is kind of hindering. I had a handful of simple perl files I wanted to serve up, but there was no cgi-bin/ in the already naked /var/www/ directory. When I tried adding one, that didn’t work. When I tried adding a ScriptAlias to the one I added, that didn’t work. I then ran across a post in the ubuntuforums that had mention of /usr/lib/cgi-bin/. Having never seen this before, I was skeptical, but as always I’m putting doubt where there needs none. It seems either the Ubuntu crew or the Apache 2 developers decided to put the cgi-bin for the web server under the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ directory, which still makes no sense to me because all things web exist under /var/www/. Go figure. I tested my scripts placed under /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ and they work great.

BTW, to keep myself sane, I added a softlink to /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ under /var/www/.