305619 - Presence of 'root' forward slash prevents path of local file being correctly submitted to a cgi/perl script via a web form.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 219470

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Nigel Binns]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050725 Firefox/1.0.6 (Ubuntu package 1.0.6)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050725 Firefox/1.0.6

The following is the raw data captured after submission of a local file to a cgi
script via a web form:

$buffer =...&fQuery=seq.fasta&...

The presence of the 'root' forward slash prevents the path to the local file
from being submitted, hence the cgi script cannot 'find the file' (seq.fasta in
the above example). If the 'root' forward slash is manually deleted prior to
clicking the submit button, the full path (minus the 'root' forward slash)  is
correctly submitted thus:
$buffer=...&fQuery=home%2Fnigelb%2Fpublic_html%2Fcgi-bin%2Fseq.fasta&...

with the forward slashes being correctly substituted for their hexadecimal
equivalents.

however, without the 'root' forward slash, the local file cannot be found.

This behaviour has some similarity to that reported on the Windows XP platform
in bug No. 263570 'Can't open a local file which has non-ascii characters in its
path/file name'.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click 'Browse' button on web form.
2. Navigate to required local file.
3. Click the submit button.

Actual Results:  
Full path to local file is not submitted by the browser to the cgi script, hence
the script returns a 'File not found' error. I can supply the web form and
script to test this if required.

Expected Results:  
Local file should be correctly submitted to the cgi script via the web browser,
which implies that the path to the file is correctly submitted.

I tested this web form and cgi/perl script combination with Firefox v1.0.6 on
Windows XP Pro SP2 with the following results:

/path/file.txt - works correctly
\path\file.txt - works correctly
C:\path\files - path not submitted, only file name (after last back slash),
however bizarrely file is found by cgi script.

I also check the behaviour of this web form and script with Internet Explorer on
Win XP Pro SP2 with the following results:

C:\path\file.txt - works correctly
/path/file.txt - won't submit, but not a problem on Windows, as root always
starts with a drive letter.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 219470 ***