Re: How Google indexed a file with no external link

[Theo Van Dinter <felicity () kluge net>]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 09:47:44PM -0400, Kevin wrote:
>       http://handsonhowto.com/?M=A
>       http://handsonhowto.com/?S=D

> ...and if you try this yourself in Internet Explorer, you'll find that 
> Apache is ignoring my index.html and is giving you a formatted directory 
> of the docroot directory as though there were no index page.

This doesn't seem to work on any of the servers I tried (the one above
included).  They're all running Apache 1.3.x (where x={2,19,20}).

Did you fix this (or otherwise make related changes) on your box?

> The differences between the ?M and the ?S versions are not blatantly
> obvious, at least not to me.

A quick check on the web Apache docs doesn't show anything, but a quick poke
at the source code (<apache dir>/src/modules/standard/mod_autoindex.c) shows
the following:

#define K_NAME 'N'              /* Sort by file name (default) */
#define K_LAST_MOD 'M'          /* Last modification date */
#define K_SIZE 'S'              /* Size (absolute, not as displayed) */
#define K_DESC 'D'              /* Description */

#define D_ASCENDING 'A'
#define D_DESCENDING 'D'

So "?M=A" is "Sort by Last modified date, ascending (earliest first)", and
"?S=D" is "Sort by size, descending (largest first)".

I believe the default is "?N=A", or alphabetically.