CGI Script example: redirection script

Most redirection scripts are called from regular html pages. So let’s say you put a form in a page that looks like this:

<html>

<body>

<h2>Redirection Form</h2>

<p>Choose where you want to go:</p>

<option value=”/somedirectory/somepage1.html”>Some Page 1

<option value=”/somedirectory/somepage2.html”>Some Page 2

<option value=”/somedirectory/somepage3.html”>Some Page 3

<option value=”/somedirectory/somepage4.html”>Some Page 4

</form>

</body>
</html>

You could then write a cgi script to forward the user there like this:

Remember, don’t type in the line numbers! They’re only included for reference.

1 #!/usr/bin/perl –w

3 use strict;

4 use CGI::Carp qw(:fatalsToBrowser);

5 use CGI qw(:standard);

6 print redirect(param(‘location’));

Line 1: Initialize the perl interpreter to run our program, and pass it the warn flag so we get good errors for debugging.

Line 2: Always put an empty line after calling perl.

Line 3: Enable more useful error messages for debugging.

Line 4: Load the module that turns cryptic 500 Internal Server Errors into useful error messages we can read in a web browser.

Line 5: Load the CGI module and import it’s functions, which saves us tons of time and effort in writing cgi scripts.

Line 6: Call the CGI.pm function redirect to redirect to another URL. In this case, we simply redirect to the url you specified in your form.