I'm wondering if anyone had seen this before.

I was working the other day on a simple modification of a form CGI processor in Perl. The HTTP page appeared to pass the data correctly to the form and the form processed it as I expected.

Of course, I had a logic error in the Perl code so I went in to edit the file. I was working with Emacs. I edited the file and retested the code. This time the submit button gave me a completely blank page. I re-edited the Perl code to print a debugging line to the page no matter what the program logic was. Still, it gave me a completely blank page. Nothing I changed in the file would modify this puzzling behavior.

After some hours, I gave up for awhile. What I ended up finding out is that the ~backup files that Emacs creates were interfering with the running of the program in the /cgi-bin directory. As soon as the ~backup file was deleted the Perl CGI program starting running as expected and is now running fine.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? We now know how to fix it - make sure there are no ~backup files in the /cgi-bin directory - but we don't know what's causing the behavior in the first place.

Doc Kinne, KQR American Association of Variable Star Observers

In reply to Perl, CGI, Emacs ~ files... by kinnerc

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