(Bear with me, I promise this gets to shebang and windows.)
I have about the simplest of WEBRick servers put together:
require 'webrick'
include WEBrick
s = HTTPServer.new(:Port=>2000, :DocumentRoot=>Dir::pwd)
s.start
Couldn't be simpler. This basic server does accept http connections (firefox, internet exploder, wget, TELENT) and deals with them appropriately, as long as I'm just fetching static documents. If, however, I set one of the files in the directory to have a .cgi extension, I get a 500 back and the following on the server's terminal:
ERROR CGIHandler: c:/rubyCGI/test.cgi:
C:/...[snip]...webrick/httpservlet/cgi_runner.rb:45: in 'exec': Exec format error - ...[snip]...
I've done a few things on the command line to mimic what is going on in line 45 of cgi_runner.rb
c:\>ruby
exec "c:/rubyCGI/test.cgi"
^Z
(same error erupts)
c:\>ruby
exec "ruby c:/rubyCGI/test.cgi"
^Z
Content-type: text/html
Mares eat oats and does eat oats and I'll be home for Christmas.
Clearly, WEBrick hasn't been cleared for landing on windows. Your usual headaches of corporate paranoia prevent me from modifying webrick, so can I get the shebang notation in c:/rubyCGI/test.cgi recognized by the OS (windows) so I don't have to explicitly tell it each time which interpreter to use? I could assign all .cgi files to be associated with ruby, but that would be limiting in the long run.
UPDATE: Since posting this, it has occurred to me that it may not be possible at all to run a cgi web server from ruby; ruby has no forking support. With no ability to fork a process, a cgi server would have to execute each cgi script one-at-a-time, neglecting all concurrent requests while the first one completed. While this may be acceptable for some, it would not work for my application. Nevertheless, I would still be very interested in an answer to my original question—that of getting shebang working under windows.