How to call same file as different name for different method? - c

Question

I was recently at a presentation where one of the speakers stated that he'd used a single CGI file, written in C, that is called by the webserver, but the webserver calls the file by using different names, the CGI file would run a different method.
How can I have a single C file execute different functions within when it is called by different names? Also how do I re-direct the calls for differently named files back to this single file?
Is this possible or was he just full of himself?

Answer 1

If you create the executable with different names but with the same code base, you can take a different branch of the code based the name of the executable used to invoke the program.
Simple example file:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main1(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf("Came to main1.\n");
return 0;
}
int main2(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf("Came to main2.\n");
return 0;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
// If the program was invoked using main1, go to main1
if (strstr(argv[0], "main1") != NULL )
{
return main1(argc-1, argv+1);
}
// If the program was invoked using main2, go to main2
if (strstr(argv[0], "main2") != NULL )
{
return main2(argc-1, argv+1);
}
// Don't know what to do.
return -1;
}
Create two different executables from the file.
cc test-262.c -o main1
cc test-262.c -o main2
Then, invoke the program by using the two different executables:
./main1
Output:
Came to main1.
and...
./main2
Output:
Came to main2.

Answer 2

Unix filesystems support the concept of hard and soft links. To create them just type:
ln origfile newfile
to create a hard link, or:
ln -s origfile newfile
to create a soft link.
Soft links are just a special kind of file that contains the path of another file. Most operations in the link transparently result in operating on the target file.
Hard links are lower level. In effect, all files are a link from the pathname to the content. In Unix you can link more than one pathname to the same content. In effect, there's no "original" and "links", all are links. When you delete a file, you're just removing a link, and when the link count goes to zero, the content is removed.
Many unix utilities do this trick. Since the running shell includes the name used to invoque the executable, it's handled just like the 0'th argument of the command line.

Answer 3

When a CGI script is being called by a web server, it receives a considerable amount of information in its environment to let it know how it was called, including:
SCRIPT_NAME, the path to the script from the document root
SCRIPT_FILENAME, the filesystem path to the script (usually the same as argv[0])
REQUEST_URI, the path that was requested by the browser (usually similar to SCRIPT_NAME in the absence of URL rewriting)
QUERY_STRING and PATH_INFO, which contain URL parameters following the script's name
HTTP_*, which contain most of the HTTP headers that were passed in the request
Point is, the script gets a lot of information about how it was called. It could be using any of those to make its decision.

Answer 4

It's possible and actually pretty common.
The first element in the argv array passed to the main function is the "name" of the executable. This can be the full path, or it can be just the last component of the path, or -- if the executable is started with an exec* function call, it can be an arbitrary string. (And Posix allows it to be a null string, as well, but in practice that's pretty rare.)
So there is nothing stopping the executable from looking at argv[0] (having first checked to make sure that argc > 0) and parsing it.
The most typical way to introduce a different name for the executable is to insert a filesystem link with the alternate name (which could be either a hard or a soft-link, but for maintainability soft links are more useful.)
For CGIs, it is not even necessary to examine argv[0], since there are various useful environment variables, including (at least): SCRIPT_NAME.