Hi Monks

I am new to Perl programming, so I apologise in advance if this is a dumb question, which it most probably is. I have checked the tutorials and Q and A sections, but I can't find the answer to my question.

What I want to do is modify a Perl CGI script so that the output (a load of html) is written to a file called output.htm rather than to the web browser. The reason for this is that the perl script takes a long time to run (it is doing many queries to a database), and so I want to make it a scheduled cron job.

I have used the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use CGI qw/:standard *table *Tr *td/; require "/home/httpd/cgi-bin/per
+l_scripts/syb_handlers.pl";
use Sybase::DBlib;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);     
&dbmsghandle ("message_handler");
&dberrhandle ("error_handler");

open(OUTPUTFILE, ">/home/output.htm") or die $!;

# print OUTPUTFILE header;

# print OUTPUTFILE start_html(
    -title=>'Title',

);

print OUTPUTFILE  (loads of lines of html resulting from the database 
+queries)

# print end_html;

[download]
I find that unless I comment out the lines that I have commented out (relating to the header, start_html and end_html), the output won't go to the file. If I do comment the lines out, then obviously the html isn't well formed because the header is missing.

Is there an obvious way around this, or do I need to explicitly write the header to the file using a print statement such as the following? 

print OUTPUTFILE "<html><head><title> TITLE </title></head>";
print OUTPUTFILE "<body>";
print OUTPUTFILE # all my html here";
print OUTPUTFILE "</body></html>";

[download]

In reply to html output to a file by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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