Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Name

XBitHack

Synopsis

XBitHack on|off|full 
Default: XBitHack off 
Context: Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess 

The XBitHack directive controls the parsing of ordinary HTML documents. This directive only affects files associated with the MIME type text/html. XBitHack can take on the following values:

off

This offers no special treatment of executable files.

on

Any text/html file that has the user-execute bit set will be treated as a server-parsed HTML document.

full

As for on but also test the group-execute bit. If it is set, then set the Last-modified date of the returned file to be the last modified time of the file. If it is not set, then no last-modified date is sent. Setting this bit allows clients and proxies to cache the result of the request.

Tip

You would not want to use the full option unless you assure the group-execute bit is unset for every SSI script that might include a CGI or otherwise produces different output on each hit (or could potentially change on subsequent requests).