Three obvious places to look:

  1. Is perl at /usr/bin/perl?
  2. Does your cgi file have a Ctrl-M tacked onto the shebang line?
  3. Is the winner, I think. Try an absolute path to statistics.txt.
Additionally, you aren't printing the http headers.

Update: ++Ovid's reply, warnings, strict and taint mode will help you a lot.

Update2: RuneK, minimally, print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; will do, but the CGI::header() call Ovid suggests is better. Ctrl-M sometimes creeps in at the end of the line when documents are produced on DOS/Windows, and transferred in binary mode to *nix servers. For a Windows user, the simplest way to fix that is to upload again in text mode.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: Apache+cgi problem by Zaxo
in thread Apache+cgi problem by RuneK

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.