Just a guess: it could be selinux enabled web server, or one with some other security enhancements.

selinux provides different security contexts, and a CGI script is run with a "www-server" (don't know the exact name) security context and can't access files with other contexts, even when the file permissions would allow that.

So go and find out more about your environment - what kind of OS is this? does it use selinux? if yes, can you change the security context of the sample directory?

(Usually Red Hat servers come with selinux out of the box, don't know about others).

In reply to Re: Troubles with CGI by moritz
in thread Troubles with CGI by downer

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