I'll put my money on your web server security... My guess is you're using Apache, running as user 'nobody'. This user has less privileges than a cockroach, so it's my guess that this account can not access your data file.

Play around with giving the nobody user access to this file. You could also in some cases log on as root and then su as nobody, to test the securities. Unix command like chown and chmod will be your friend to solve this one.

Cheers

#!/massyn.pl

Don't -- me without telling me why. If you asked a stupid question, I wouldn't down vote you.