In my experiance, at least for Apache server and IIS for windows a #!perl is necessary. this same line is not necessary for console programs, which sometime confuses new users because the console spits out valid HTML, but they get 500 errors from a browser.

Generally if perl is on the path(usually the case with active state install) #!perl will do it, otherwise you need the full #!C:\Perl\bin\perl you can add .exe to that but it's not necessary.

You can configure apache to recognize .cgi as a file to be interpreted by perl, but this is not general practice because cgi programs can be written in many languages.

One (possibly obvious) thing to note cgi scripts usually can only be run from specific directories, commonly cgi-bin, but I've seen it be called "scripts" as well.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.