This turned out to not be a Perl problem at all. Turns out there were two issues that were causing the problem:

  1. The value for $ENV{"HOME"} is undefined when running the script as a CGI due to the way the hosting company sets up its server environment. I solved this by hardcoding the pasth. (I hate doing that)
  2. Turned out the server was configured such that there is a restriction on the mime types a CGI script can send. The hosting company's philosophy is if you aren't smart enough to ask for an exception you don't get the exception. Once they added "image/png" to their list for my virtual server all was good.
What was partially tripping me up was the script ran fine from the command line even remotely as in 
ssh ${server} ${path}/sendRandomImage.pl

[download]
and did what I expected.

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to SOLVED: Using GD in a CGI script to randomly select images fails... by blue_cowdawg
in thread Using GD in a CGI script to randomly select images fails... by blue_cowdawg

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