What should happen when you HEAD a CGI script?

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Sat, 18 Dec 1993 02:58:02 -0800

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)