-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Thanks for the clarification -- even CGI.pm's redirect() method doesn't print the status line:

perl -MCGI -e 'print CGI->new({})->redirect("/foo/b ar.cgi");'
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gives:

Status: 302 Moved
location: /foo/bar.cgi

This doesn't apply to nph CGI's, correct?

I didn't know that. Thanks

For nph (non-parsable-headers, or something like that) CGI's, you need to construct all headers yourself, giving full freedom over what is being sent. With normal CGI, the _server_ interprets your Status-header, and will use it instead of its default "200" (OK) status => the Status header is not sent to the user agent.
With a nph CGI, you need to construct the first line of the response yourself.

# Normal CGI (The Status line is optional, the server will try to be i
+ntelligent and guess it)
Status: 302 Found
Location: foo
<blank line>

# NPH CGI
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: foo
<blank line>
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2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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The browser DOES see it. The webserver will add the status by itself, or takes it from the Status header.
This means there'll be _two_ requests, one'll hit the request, one'll hit the image. If everything's fast enough, the user will never notice.



a251111.upc-a.chello.nl - - [19/Dec/2001:16:55:17 +0100] "GET /test/te
+st.cgi HTTP/1.1" 302 286 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/2.2.
+2; Linux 2.4.10-ac12; X11; i686; en)"
a251111.upc-a.chello.nl - - [19/Dec/2001:16:55:18 +0100] "GET /test/te
+st.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/2.2.2;
+ Linux 2.4.10-ac12; X11; i686; en)"
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The 302 status is "Found", which tells the browser to re-request using the URL in the Location-header.
The 304 is "Not modified", telling my browser to use the cached version.



2;0 juerd@serv:~/juerd.nl/juerd.nl/test$ cat test.cgi
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Location: test.txt\n\n";
2;0 juerd@serv:~/juerd.nl/juerd.nl/test$ cat test.txt; echo
Hello world
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merlyn, perhaps you meant s/browser/user/; s/CGI/HTTP/; s/server/browser/?

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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Not with Apache, CGI, and a proper absolute path that begins with a slash. The browser will never know it happens. There's something broken in your test.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker