On any modern OS, your CGI program will run with a certain user ID. Just make sure that the location you want to write to is writeable by the effective user ID the script is running as. Without knowing anything about your operating system, it's hard to say exactly how to do this. On a Unix-like system, assuming you're using a plain Apache installation, the default user is "nobody", so something like this would work (for some definition of "work"):

# chown nobody.nobody /path/where/cgi/can/write
# chmod 0755 /path/where/cgi/can/write
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But you really should consult the documentation on file permissions for your operating system.

If not P, what? Q maybe?
"Sidney Morgenbesser"

Actually the default user now tends to be 'apache' but of course the logic is correct. $! will reveal the error if it fails (usually Permission Denied).

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $file = '/path/to/some/file';
open FILE, ">$file" or die_nice( "Could not open $file, Reason $!\n" )
+;
print FILE "Woo-hoo!";
close FILE;
print header(), "<h2>Wrote $file OK</h2>";

sub die_nice( print header(), shift; exit }

sub header { return "Content-type: text/html\n\n" }
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cheers

tachyon

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