Skip to Main Content
Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition
book

Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

by Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
June 2002
Beginner content levelBeginner
759 pages
80h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Debugging

A complication of writing CGI scripts is that when debugging the script, you have to wrestle with the web server environment. CGI.pm provides support for debugging the script on the command line.

If you run the script on the command line without arguments, you will be placed into an “offline” mode, in which name/value pairs can be entered one-by-one. When you press Ctrl-D, the script runs. For example:

% birthday
(offline mode: enter name=value pairs on standard input)
birthday=6/4/65
^D
Content-type: text/html

<P>Your birthday is 6/4/65.</P>

You can also supply the name/value parameters directly on the command line. For example:

% test birthday=6/4/65
Content-type: text/html

<P>Your birthday is 6/4/65.</P>

Multiple values can be separated by spaces (as separate arguments on the command line) or by ampersands (as in URL-encoded syntax). In fact, you can use URL-encoded syntax on the command line. This makes it easy to supply raw CGI input to the script for testing purposes. Just remember to protect the ampersand from the shell.

% test 'birthday=6%2f4%2f65&name=Fred%20Flintstone'
Content-type: text/html

<P>Fred Flintstone, your birthday is 6/4/65.</P>
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Perl by Example, Fourth Edition

Perl by Example, Fourth Edition

Ellie Quigley
Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington
Perl in a Nutshell

Perl in a Nutshell

Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
Learning Perl, 7th Edition

Learning Perl, 7th Edition

Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, Tom Phoenix

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596002416Errata Page