Is there a way to dynamically find a user's cgi-bin path using PHP and write a file to it?
For instance, I want to write a PHP application that also uses a Perl script for additional functionality (will not break without it), and on first run I want to get the path for cgi-bin or whatever the user's directory is named, and write the script into the directory so that it can be invoked by the application, with minimal installation required by the user (i.e. upload application to a directory, then run index.php).
Is this possible? Or am I dreaming far beyond what I can actually do?
The simplest solution I see to this would be to use a regex to check for a directory named /cgi/ starting at the user's root directory, however, this doesn't seem like an entirely reliable method
There is no sane way.
A server can be configured to execute CGI programs in zero, one or many different locations, none of which have to have "cgi" in the name.
You could try parsing the server configuration to identify which (if any) locations are set up that way, but you would have to write a separate parser for each server, and each one would be very complex. Even if you limit things to Apache, then you would have to deal with filtering based on virtual hosts, <file>, <directory>, <location>, ScriptAlias, .htaccess, etc.
__FILE__ gives you under both Perl and PHP the name of the currently executed file.