as an afterthought, that &get_response clobbers %ENV, so you might want to add local %ENV=%ENV; as the first line in sub get_response

as a second afterthought, my ($cgi, $CMD) = shift; looks strange. i would have used my ($cgi, $CMD) = @_; instead

Hello huck,

Thank you but I am on ashared server with no CMD line so when I insert those lines and rem out the old ones I get Internal Server Error.

This works

system("copyorders_multiple.pl?refID=".&trim($license)) or die "Unable to get document: $!";

but how do I add this

$data = $body();

when I insert those lines and rem out the old ones I get Internal Server Error.

Perhaps because Perl doesn't use "rem" as the comment indicator. Try # instead.

But thank you for the sudden and unexpected 35 year timewarp back to adolescent me hacking my brains out on BASIC. My $DEITY, those were the days!

This works just fine for me as a "redirect"

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $cgi='/home/huck/cvs/cgi-bins/bt-bin/ut-active.pl'; 
my $parms='txtstats-1=1'; 
my $all=get_response($cgi,$parms);
#my $all=get_response("/full/path/to/copyorders_multiple.pl", "refID="
+.&trim($license));
my ($data)=$all=~/\n\n(.*)$/s; 
#print $data; 
print $all; 
sub get_response {
  local %ENV=%ENV; 
  my ($cgi, $CMD) = @_;
 
  ## prepare proper (CGI) environment
  $ENV{QUERY_STRING} = $CMD;
  $ENV{REQUEST_METHOD} = 'GET';
  $ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} = 'CGI/1.1';
  # add more as needed
  open(CGI, "$cgi |") or die "Can't exec $cgi, $!";
  local $/ = undef;
  my $res = <CGI>;
  close(CGI) or die "Error running $cgi, $!";
  return $res;
}
[download]

so i dont know what to say, perhaps what Hippo says in Re^4: replace use HTTP::Lite to run a perl file that was on another server is the problem, or you could look in the error log, mine is at /var/log/apache2/error.log, YMMV

Notice i printed $all, so all the proper headers would be returned to the browser

EDIT: "as a redirect", means that going to http://lxle0/bt-bin/fakecgi.pl returned the same as going to http://lxle0/bt-bin/ut-active.pl?txtstats-1=1. This is an internal server running apache2 on lxle (ubuntu) and in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf there is

ScriptAlias /bt-bin/ /home/huck/cvs/cgi-bins/bt-bin/

<Directory /home/huck/cvs/cgi-bins/bt-bin/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 AllowOverride None
 Satisfy Any
# Require all granted
    Options +ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
</Directory>
[download]

As a lark try this

my $all=get_response("copyorders_multiple.pl", "refID=".&trim($license
+));
my ($data)=$all=~/\n\n(.*)$/s; 
sub get_response {
  local %ENV=%ENV; 
  my ($cgi, $CMD) = @_;
 
  ## prepare proper (CGI) environment
  $ENV{QUERY_STRING} = $CMD;
  $ENV{REQUEST_METHOD} = 'GET';
  $ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} = 'CGI/1.1';
  # add more as needed
  open(CGI, "$cgi |") or die "Can't exec $cgi, $!";
  local $/ = undef;
  my $res = <CGI>;
  close(CGI) or die "Error running $cgi, $!";
  return $res;
}
[download]

and if it works, SHEESH

I think you are confused by the variable $CMD which is not the CMD line.

Maybe this looks better to you:

sub get_response {
  my ($cgi, $query) = shift;
 
  $ENV{QUERY_STRING} = $query;
  $ENV{REQUEST_METHOD} = 'GET';
  $ENV{GATEWAY_INTERFACE} = 'CGI/1.1';

  open(CGI, '-|', $cgi) or die "Can't exec $cgi, $!";
  local $/ = undef;
  my $res = <CGI>;
  close(CGI) or die "Error running $cgi, $!";
  return $res;
}
[download]

Note: I used the 3 argument form of open as it is generally safer to use.