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

I've written a multipage form via CGI.pm that started by using Recipie 19-9 (pg 700) of The Perl Cookbook. The script works great on apache. I moved the script to netscape 4. The page loads the first form up fine but does nothing when any of the buttons are pressed any more. (And no errors are created in the log). There appears to be a difference in the way CGI.pm is maintaining state on netscape versus apache. This is a long script and it has to run off the netscape server. I'm looking for a clue (as if that isn't obvious).

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Re: CGI Apache2Netscape4
by gnat (Beadle) on Jul 12, 2000 at 00:23 UTC
    I don't know what the problem might be. One possibility is that Netscape's server is more aggressive about killing CGI programs when they don't produce valid headers. Try this at the very start of your program: 

    BEGIN {
  print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n";
  open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT");
}

    [download]
    That will let you see all that is printed by your program. Perhaps it's not producing a valid header? Maybe something odd is coming from CGI.pm.

    Does the Netscape server have an option to disable cookies or anything like that? It might be filtering outgoing headers. Beyond that, I really haven't a clue. I'd love to find out when you solve it, though.

    Good luck!

    Nat

[reply]
[d/l]
      Well for now I've just settled for redirecting from the netscape server to the apache server. Thanks for the advice I'll be trying to figure out if the information I recieved from your suggestion will help me to figure the problem out. Here are the results I recieved; Off the netscape server (where it doesn't work) I recieve this information: FORM METHOD="POST" ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" And then just the htmlified (tags showing) first form. Where as the apache server reports: Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 and loads up the form/script like a champ. Thanks again (I'm calling it a day) Coreolyn.
[reply]
        You can configure Apache to send Content-Type headers automatically. Are you sending one explicitly from your script? Depending on if or how the server parses things, you may have to do more work to get the right stuff to the browser.

        If you're using CGI.pm, just use the header() method.

[reply]

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