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

I have activestate perl installed on a w2k server running iis. Scripts run from the commandline open files without difficulty, but not when run as a cgi... comments?
  • Comment on activestate opens files from commandline but not when executed as a cgi

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Re: activestate opens files from commandline but not when executed as a cgi
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jun 10, 2002 at 19:03 UTC

    Remember to add an "or die: $!" (or croak) after the open. That will write a useful message to the error log.

        my $file = 'somedir/somefile.dat';
    open FILE, "< $file" or die "Cannot open $file for reading: $!";

    [download]

    The problem is likely bad permissions. You run from the command line as a different set of permissions from the Web server. It's also possible that if you're running the file from a different location, your paths could be wrong and the system can't find the file specified.

    Cheers,
    Ovid

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[d/l]
      To elaborate, I am using absolute, not relative paths, I do have a die after the open, no message is printed. The server is running as LOCAL_USER, the file permissions are set such that any user has full privileges on the file its parent directories.
[reply]
        Where are you looking for the error messages?

        Try
        use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
        to see the error in the browser, or check the server error logs.

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[d/l]
Re: activestate opens files from commandline but not when executed as a cgi
by dree (Monsignor) on Jun 10, 2002 at 19:20 UTC
    Are you using relative paths to read the file?

    IIS doesn't like relative paths... try absolute ones.
    For example, try: 
    ($relative_path=$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}) =~ s|[^/]+$||;
$absolute_path=$ENV{PATH_TRANSLATED}.$relative_path;

$filename=$absolute_path.'file.txt';

    [download]
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[d/l]
Re: activestate opens files from commandline but not when executed as a cgi
by feanor (Initiate) on Jun 10, 2002 at 21:34 UTC
    THE ANSWER IS: use single quotes, not double quotes in the open() statement.

    So:
    open(HEADER, 'D:\path\to\file\file.txt') || die ("$!"); This works!

    NOT: open(HEADER, "D:\path\to\file\file.txt") || die ("$!"); This doesn't work!
[reply]
      or escape the slashes, of course
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