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The cgiparse program

The cgiparse program is used to extract information from query strings and forms data, according to the CGI specification. If invoked without any arguments, or with an invalid argument, it prints a terse summary of its command line options. It can be used, among other things, to:

• Parse the CGI QUERY_STRING environment variable for search keywords, decode them and output them one per line.

• Parse the CGI QUERY_STRING environment variable as a fill-out form request and output the fields as a set of Bourne shell environment variable initialization strings, which can then be evaluated in the parent shell script.

• Parse the CGI QUERY_STRING environment variable as a fill-out form request and print the value of a specified field.

• Read a fill-out form request from the standard input stream if the environment variable QUERY_STRING is not set, and generate a Bourne shell initialization string for that variable. This can be used to allow forms requests submitted with HTTP GET and POST methods to be handled by the same script.

• Count the number of distinct forms fields submitted.

• Count the number of values supplied for a specified forms field.

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.