Debugging 101 says to figure out what is undefined and why. It might help to do that before you starting throwing potential solutions around. If TemporaryBag.pm is one of yours, consider posting part of it. Lines 190-210 might be nice.

This does not sound like an issue that would be resolved via making the script setuid. Without seeing the code, we can only speculate, and hope that something we post here helps you.

As was already posted, it sounds like perhaps either an issue of something not being defined as expected, or going out of scope earlier than expected, or perhaps something different in the environment the webserver will use than from your normal environment (paths, etc.). Does the webserver have appropriate permissions on the directory to write a file to it?

You mention that the SWF file is chmod'd 777-in general, this is a BAD thing (from a security standpoint, see also Security issues when allowing file upload via CGI, among other posts on that arena). I would seriously doubt that the generated file needs to be executable, so another permission might be a better (at worst, maybe 666).

I hope this, and suggestions from the many monks much wiser than my lowly self, help you with this question.

I would, instead, like to question the need for writing the file at all. You might have a very valid reason for actually writing the file to disc, but I would suggest creating the SWF file on the fly when it is requested, if possible. That way you can send the file directly to the browser without having to store it locally.

Without knowing more about the nature of the cgi-script, I cannot tell if it is feasible. If the SWFfile is created from a single argument, like a textstring, I think you should consider this approach.

thanks for the suggestions and sorry if my question was kind of incomplete.. I was all about 'permission problem' cos during development i was getting some error-logs about that and also because of the 'command-line' success'.... Talking about creating the SWF on the fly ...i have to admit i don't even know how to start doing this... Do i print it to the browser?

The short answer is that, yes, you just print to the browser. You must begin with a correct Content-type-header, then two linefeeds and then you print the SWF data to the browser.

Something like

print "Content-type: application/x-shockwave-flash\n\n";
print $SWFdata;

would suffice as a really simple SWF-on-the-fly-generation-CGI- script. You get the picture.

The part where you generate $SWFdata is obviously the non-trivial part, but you seem to have solved that already. If I remember correctly, there is a SWF-creation module that's perhaps worth checking out.