We recently inherited a somewhat legacy perl application and we're working to migrate to a new server as well as setup a sandbox environment so we can start sorting the application out. The issue we're having is the code currently uses some relative paths for the open method. And currently works in their shared hosting environment (we have little access to) 
open(HANDLE,"<../relative/path/to/file.txt")

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We pulled all of the code, paths, etc. over and for the most part have the application up and running until we run into one of the scripts that does the above, opens a file with a relative path. Then it fails. If we run the code via the command line, the relative path works. If we modify the path to be the full path it works both via command line and through Apache (navigating to the page in the browser). This makes me think there is some module or configuration option we need to set in Apache to allow for the perl scripts to access or use the open command with relative paths? After reading a few other posts that seem to have the same issue (but never saw a final solution) we added in a couple print statements 
print `pwd`;
print `ls -l`;

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And the script despite being in /srv/site/scripts/script.pl and accessible via example.com/scripts/script.pl prints out 
/

the contents of / of the server... /etc, /var, /home, etc...

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Thoughts on what we're doing wrong here and why the script does not see its actual path and therefore able to access another file up a directory and into another?

In reply to Perl - open with Apache by djneely

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