G'day jjeff007,

Welcome to the Monastery.

The prompt you show in your tests (i.e. [root@XXXX perl5]#) suggests that you're running these tests as root. It's unlikely that your CGI scripts are being run by root. Determine which user is running your CGI scripts and then rerun your tests as this user: this may highlight the problem.

Your "head cips.cgi" output has presumably been modified (there's no use CGI or other CGI code); however, you don't show what you've changed: a simple truncation or a more substantial modification (possibly including a reordering of the lines shown). The following is guesswork, as I'm pretty much working in the dark here, but consider:

• Data::Dumper is a core module so I wouldn't expect problems with this regardless of user or perl version.
• LWP::UserAgent is an installed module but you show no problems with this: cips.cgi appears to be reading LWP/UserAgent.pm without any issues.
• JSON::XS is also an installed module and cips.cgi does have problems reading JSON/XS.pm. How do file permissions or Apache (or equivalent) configuration differ between LWP/UserAgent.pm and JSON/XS.pm?
• Use the strict pragma.
• Use the warnings pragma instead of the -w switch as recommended in perlrun:

  "... the lexically scoped use warnings pragma is preferred."

If the information I've provided results in a fix for JSON::XS, you may find this also leads to a solution for your Email::Stuff problem.

Is the cgi program using the same perl as your shell test?

I specify the interpreter in the cgi script It should be all the same

[root@XXXX perl5]# which perl
/usr/bin/perl
[root@XXXX perl5]# head /var/www/cgi-bin/iprs/cips.cgi
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use LWP::UserAgent;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON::XS;
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Hi jjeff007,

Try running this from the browser and from the command line, maybe it will give you a clue:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Config;
use CGI qw/header/;
print header('text/plain');
print "Perl $] at $^X, perlpath is $Config{perlpath}\n",
    "EUID/EGID: $>/$)\n", "\@INC:\n";
print +((-r)?'':'NOT READABLE: ')."\"$_\"\n" for @INC;
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Just remember to delete it from your webserver after you test; it may reveal information to an attacker.

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D

Strange. I'd start the web server in debug mode, i.e. single instance, and strace -o /tmp/debug.strace -s 4096 -f -p $PID that and grep the output for JSON/XS. That might give a clue.