Hi whitdan,

First of all, the architecture of having a CGI script make system calls is something to be very, very careful with, as it can easily allow attackers access to your system. The very least you need to do is protect access to the server / the script with some kind of authentication mechanism. Even then, you need to be very careful with any input you get and might want to pass along to the system command.

Having said that, you're clearing the PATH environment variable and then attempting to call perl without the full pathname. Try calling it as /usr/bin/perl (or wherever your perl binary is installed).

Another thing to remember is that the user the web server and CGI script is being run as often doesn't have permissions to anything, e.g. the nobody user.

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D


In reply to Re: System calls from CGI script by haukex
in thread System calls from CGI script by whitdan

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.