I recently (yesterday) upgraded my Perl to 5.6.1 (from 5.6), and also upgraded CGI to the most recent version (from 2.78 to 2.81). I have a strange problem with a script that has worked just fine before the upgrade.

The script edits database rows, and takes in a fair bit of information from other database tables. When the script is called to either print out the rows of a table, or delete rows, it works fine. When it is called to enter data, or edit data, it seems to simply, barf. I don't have a better word for this, because the only error I get (if I get one) is "Premature end of script headers". Sometimes, if I have it print some output, it won't give me an error, but stop in the middle of the output. It's quite strange. Here's the first part of the code - the error definitely happens in here - it doesn't get further in the script. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use strict;

use DBI;
use CGI ':standard';
use Date::Calc qw(:all);

use vars qw(@form_elements $login_id);

##################################################################
#
# parse the input form
#
#################################################################

my %query = ();
my %configs = ();
my %meta_configs = ();

my $q = new CGI;

foreach ($q->param) {
    $query{$_} = $q->param("$_");
}

print $q->header;

print $q->start_html(-title=>'XINA Database Editing');

#################################################################
#
#         Let's get the configurations necessary
#
##################################################################

# foreach (keys %query) {print; print":$query{$_}<br>\n";}

# first, the meta_configs:


my $meta_conf;

if (!$query{meta}) {$meta_conf = "xina_meta.conf";}
else {
    $meta_conf = $query{meta};
    if ($meta_conf =~ /^([-\w.]+)$/) {$meta_conf = $1;}
    else {#will log it
          }
}

open (CONFIG, $meta_conf) or &graceful_exit("Can't open meta config fi
+le!");

my @meta_configs_file = <CONFIG>;

foreach (@meta_configs_file) {
    chomp;
    if (/^#|^\n/) {
        next;
    } else {
        (my $var, my $val, my @more_vals) = split ('=');
        if($var) {$var =~ s/\ $//;}
        if ($val) {$val =~ s/^\ //;}
        if ($var) {
            if(!$more_vals[0]) {$meta_configs{$var} = $val;}
            else {
                my $more_vals = join('=',@more_vals);
                $meta_configs{$var} = $val."=".$more_vals;}
        }
    }
}

foreach (keys %meta_configs) { print "$_:$meta_configs{$_}<br>\n";}

[download]
Suggestions, Ideas, things I'm stupidly missing? (It doesn't seem to matter how big the query string is - even sending small query info, by Post or Get, gives me the same result.)

In reply to Strange problem on upgrading Perl and CGI by michellem

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