Page Names That DWiki Won't Serve

There are some paths and page names that DWiki categorically refuses to serve, even if they seem to resolve to real files. Because they're enforced by both low-level code and high-level code, they apply to DWiki pages, static files being served by DWiki, and even templates. (Technically they apply to comments too, but comments can't generate file names that violate these rules.)

What gets rejected:

Any path that includes a path component that starts with a ., ends with ,v or a ~, or is RCS.

Any non-relative path that includes .., ., or a sequence //; usually this might appear in the URL of an incoming request. (Incoming requests are not supposed to include things like that. But ChrisSiebenmann declines to believe that everyone sending DWiki requests is going to do what they're supposed to.)

DWiki will reject REDIRECT files that either have too many '..' entries (so that they are trying to escape the root of the page directory) or that fail these checks after they've potentially been converted from relative path names to absolute inside-DWiki paths.

When DWiki rejects bad paths, generally it says that there is no page by that name. Sometimes it rejects the request entirely in huge flames.

Redirection Files

Files in the page directory can create HTTP redirections, making it trivial to support plurals, moved/renamed pages, and so on. There are two ways of doing it: REDIRECT content and symbolic links.

If a file starts with a line that says 'REDIRECT somewhere', and does not have more than a few lines of content, DWiki considers it a redirection. The somewhere is basically interpreted as if it was appearing in a [[....]], so it can be:

• redirection to another DWiki page.
• redirection to an external web site, written as http://....
• redirection to an absolute URL on this web site, written as <...>

These files are generically called REDIRECT files.

A symbolic link is only considered a redirect if DWiki can 'resolve' it into an existing page. To resolve the symbolic link redirect, DWiki tries to interpret the symbolic link's value as if it was appearing in a [[...]] as a DWiki relative page name.

If the symbolic link doesn't resolve this way, DWiki treats the whole thing as an ordinary page; this keeps 'ordinary' uses of symlinks intact in most cases, including when the symlinks point to something outside the DWiki page directory.

Redirects to http:// links or absolute URL links are a convenient way of creating WikiWord abbreviations to external things for local use. Make an appropriate REDIRECT file, stick it in your Aliases area, and now every page in the DWiki can say GoogleSearch or something and get a link, bam.

(WikiWord redirection rewriting means that in many cases the generated link will even point to the real target instead of the REDIRECT file, as you can see here.)