[thelist] perl and cgi-bin

[Oren Levin]

Bob Meetin wrote:
> On all the sites where it is working cgi-bin is under webroot - i.e. 
> /home/myaccount/www/cgi-bin
> Here it was sitting at /home/myaccount/cgi-bin.  This wasn't about to 
> work, so I created it under www.

Having your cgi-bin directory outside of the document root (www) is not 
necessarily a problem. A "standard" installation of apache, for example, 
is set up this way.

> I set up everything mimicing a site where I'd recently installed 
> dadamail 3.0 (latest) but accessing mail.cgi displays a blank page.  Not 
> knowing too much about perl, I found a copy of hello world via google 
> and placed it in the same folder, making it executable.  All it does is 
> display the contents of the file:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
> print "<H1>Hello World</H1>\n";
> 
> On my site it prints Hello World.  So, I'm guessing that it's either a 
> problem with perl or perhaps the path to perl.  Other question, other 
> than the fact that cgi-bin typically resides under www, is there 
> anything particular about it?

Again, depending on how the server is set up, it may not allow execution 
of any file under www. Try removing www/cgi-bin, putting your hello 
world script in the original cgi-bin directory, and try again.

Oren