On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 06:31:09PM -0500, Brad Rice wrote:
> I'm having a problem using CGI.pm on my webserver. I can run the script from
> the command line no problem, but when I try running it in the browser I get
> a 500 error message. This is the CGI.pm script:
>
perldoc perlfaq9:
My CGI script runs from the command line but not the browser. (500
Server Error)
If you can demonstrate that you've read the following FAQs and that
your problem isn't something simple that can be easily answered, you'll
probably receive a courteous and useful reply to your question if you
post it on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi (if it's something to do
with HTTP, HTML, or the CGI protocols). Questions that appear to be Perl
questions but are really CGI ones that are posted to comp.lang.perl.misc
may not be so well received.
The useful FAQs and related documents are:
CGI FAQ
http://www.webthing.com/tutorials/cgifaq.html
Web FAQ
http://www.boutell.com/faq/
WWW Security FAQ
http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/
HTTP Spec
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/
HTML Spec
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/
CGI Spec
http://www.w3.org/CGI/
CGI Security FAQ
http://www.go2net.com/people/paulp/cgi-security/safe-cgi.txt
How can I get better error messages from a CGI program?
Use the CGI::Carp module. It replaces C<warn> and C<die>, plus the
normal Carp modules C<carp>, C<croak>, and C<confess> functions with
more verbose and safer versions. It still sends them to the normal
server error log.
use CGI::Carp;
warn "This is a complaint";
die "But this one is serious";
The following use of CGI::Carp also redirects errors to a file of your
choice, placed in a BEGIN block to catch compile-time warnings as well:
BEGIN {
use CGI::Carp qw(carpout);
open(LOG, ">>/var/local/cgi-logs/mycgi-log")
or die "Unable to append to mycgi-log: $!\n";
carpout(*LOG);
}
You can even arrange for fatal errors to go back to the client browser,
which is nice for your own debugging, but might confuse the end user.
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
die "Bad error here";
Even if the error happens before you get the HTTP header out, the module
will try to take care of this to avoid the dreaded server 500 errors.
Normal warnings still go out to the server error log (or wherever
you've sent them with C<carpout>) with the application name and date
stamp prepended.
