bgatto has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm trying to write a CGI script that emails a user,
displays on a screen in HTML that they received the
email and writes to a log file. When I enter the data
and click on the button nothing happens. I'm highly
confident that my HTML cod is correct. It looks like this:

<form method=POST action='http://learneasymoney.com/cgi-bin/msgout.cgi
+'>
<b><font face="arial" size=5 color="#ffffff">
Name: <input type="text" name="fullname" size=35><br>
&nbsp;eMail: <input type="text" name="email" size=35>
</b></font>
<input type="hidden" name="subject" value="PPC Traffic & Profits Machi
+ne Info">
<input type="hidden" name="owner" value="admin@learneasymoney.com">
<input type="hidden" name="product" value="PPC Traffic & Profits Machi
+ne">
<input type="hidden" name="info" value="PPC marketing and how to make 
+great money with it.">
<p align="center"><button type="submit" name="submit" background="#fff
+f00" style="font:24pt Arial Black; color:#0000FF;">Get It Now!</butto
+n></p>
</form>

[download]

I reduced the CGI code to this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI ':standard';

open (LOG, "http://learneasymoney.com/logs/optin.txt") || Error('open'
+, 'file');
print LOG "This is a test";
close (LOG);

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print qq (<html><body bgcolor='#0000FF'>);
print qq (<p>&nbsp;);
print qq (<p>&nbsp;);
print qq (<p>&nbsp;);
print qq (<p align='center'>'Hello All!');
print qq (</body></html>);

sub Error {
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print qq (<html><body bgcolor='#FF0000'>);
print qq (<p align='center'>The server can't $_[0] the $_[1]</p>);
print qq (<p align='center'>$!</p>);
print qq (</body></html>);
exit;

[download]

The cgi-bin directory and msgout.cgi file permissions are both set to 755.

So what could be going wrong?

(I noticed a couple of red plus signs in my question when I clicked on 'preview'.
When I went back and checked it out, I couldn't find why this was happening).

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Nothing is happening in my CGI code.
by hippo (Archbishop) on Jul 02, 2013 at 19:49 UTC

    First off, your code doesn't compile:

    $ perl -Tcw /tmp/nuts.pl
Missing right curly or square bracket at /tmp/nuts.pl line 25, at end 
+of line
syntax error at /tmp/nuts.pl line 25, at EOF
/tmp/nuts.pl had compilation errors.

    [download]

    Once you've sorted that, you'll need to take another hard look at your open statement and realise that the second argument is a URL, so the open will almost certainly fail.

    Then there's the fact that you are opening (or trying to open) a file for reading and then immediately write to it. That isn't going to work either.

    You also have a use CGI line in there, but it isn't clear to me why you have done that when you are not apparently using any of its features.

    Final tip: don't just guess why your script doesn't work - check the error log on the server.

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Re: Nothing is happening in my CGI code.
by tobyink (Canon) on Jul 02, 2013 at 19:18 UTC

    This sub seems to be missing its closing }...

    sub Error {

    [download]
    package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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Re: Nothing is happening in my CGI code. (escapeHTML)
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 02, 2013 at 20:46 UTC

    In addition to what the others said, this  The server can't $_[0] the $_[1] is missing some form of escapeHTML($var)

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Re: Nothing is happening in my CGI code.
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 03, 2013 at 13:02 UTC
    Good luck with your pyramid scheme.
[reply]

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