What should happen when you HEAD a CGI script?

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To: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Subject: What should happen when you HEAD a CGI script?
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1993 02:58:02 -0800
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU>
Message-id: <9312180258.aa22020@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Content-Length: 768

While poking around in the NCSA httpd_1.0 source code, I noticed that
the CGI script interface does not treat the HEAD method differently
than the GET method.  Unlike the older htbin interface, performing a

HEAD /cgi-bin/script HTTP/1.0

will return exactly the same result (including body contents) as the

GET /cgi-bin/script HTTP/1.0

request.  There is no mention of HEAD responses in the initial CGI spec.

Is this just a simple oversight?  Or is it a feature?

My preference would be for HEAD to check the existance, authorization,
and executability of the script and just return the response headers.
Am I missing something (besides sleep)?


....Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                   (fielding@ics.uci.edu)