I am learning to write simple cgi scripts. I could not get it to run on my
Liunx apache. I can view web pages in /home/httpd/html directory, but I put
some perl scripts in /home/httpd/cgi-bin, every time I tried to go
http://myserver/cgi-bin/script, I got an access error message, in the error
log it like this: "GET /cgi-bin/howdy.pl HTTP/1.1" 500 534".
What is wrong and what should I do?
My system: RedHat 6.1, Apache 1.3

Thanks in advance.

Yijian at yiji...@hotmail.com

From: Yijian Cao <yiji...@hotmail.com>

I am learning to write simple cgi scripts. I could not get it to run
 on my
Liunx apache. I can view web pages in /home/httpd/html directory, but
 I put
some perl scripts in /home/httpd/cgi-bin, every time I tried to go
http://myserver/cgi-bin/script, I got an access error message, in the
 error
log it like this: "GET /cgi-bin/howdy.pl HTTP/1.1" 500 534".
What is wrong and what should I do?
My system: RedHat 6.1, Apache 1.3

Thanks in advance.

Yijian at yiji...@hotmail.com

From: lba...@mindspring.com (ljb)

Look in the error log, not the access log, for more information.
A 500 error is a server problem; with CGI scripts it often means
something went wrong before the script could write headers back.

I have had a similar problem myself the last two days, not with Perl but
with a C++ program.

Might be a bit basic, but it is worth checking out the obvious first.

Make sure you have your Apache server set up to run cgi scripts (in
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).  Seems like you have got this working already
since you can access the script.  I configured my Apache server to:
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/httpd/cgi-bin/
AddHandler cgi-script cgi

Also check you print out the following lines to standard out as the first
lines:
Content-type: text/html
<newline>
<newline>

It is imporant to have two newline lines after the Content-type.

Also make sure you do not send anything to standard out before the
"Content-type" line.

What about changing permission on your perl script so the web server can run
it ?  Try "$chmod 777 perlscript.pl".

Do you have a line like "#! /usr/bin/perl" as the first line in your script
so the Web server knows to run the perl interpreter on the script ?

Hope this helps.

Arne