Learning Perl, Second Edition

19.9. Troubleshooting CGI Programs

CGI programs launched from a web server run under a fundamentally different environment than they do when invoked from the command line. While you should always verify that your CGI program runs properly from the command line,^[14] this isn't enough to guarantee that your program will work when called from the web server.

^[14] See the CGI.pm documentation for tips on command-line debugging.

You should get the CGI programming FAQ and a good book on CGI programming to help you in this. Some of these are listed at the end of this chapter. Here's a brief list of the frequent problems that arise in CGI programming. Almost all of them trigger those annoyingly unhelpful 500 Server Error messages that you will soon come to know and hate.

• If, when sending HTML to a browser, you forget the blank line between the HTTP header (that is, the Content-type line) and the body, it won't work. Remember to output a proper Content-Type line (and possibly other HTTP headers) plus a totally blank line before you do anything else.

• The server needs read and execute access to the script, so its permissions should usually be mode 0555 or, better, 0755. (This is UNIX-specific.)

• The directory where the script resides must itself be executable, so give it permissions of 0111 or, better, 0755. (This is UNIX-specific.)

• The script must be installed in the proper directory for your server configuration. For example, on some systems, it may be /usr/etc/httpd/cgi-bin/ .

• You may need ...