I have a cgi-script that is supposed to run another script via system and then open a txt file to read two lines of data. All is fine until it tries to open the file. In both terminal and browser I get the error message 'No such file or directory.' No amount of googling or searching the archives in the Monastery has helped me. As far as I can tell the file is valid because:

• I have checked the file's existence and permissions manually in the file system and using -e, -w and -r in the script.
• The file in question is opened by the second script that is called. (I get the same message when the second script is not called so I am confident it relates to the attempt to open the file for reading in this script.)

The script follows including the test for the file which is really only for troubleshooting:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use lib "/usr/local/lib/perl/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8";
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);
use strict;
print header;
    my ($x, $y);
    my $datafile = "/full/path/to/file/data.txt";
    system("perl /full/path/to/file.cgi")==0 or die "system failed $?"
+;    
if(!(-w $datafile)){
    print "What file?<br>";
}    
else{    
    open (FILE, '<', '$datafile') || die "Could not read $datafile $!\
+n";
        $x = <FILE>;        
        $y = <FILE>;
    close (FILE);
}
print $x."<br>";
print $y."<br>";
[download]

I'd appreciate any thoughts on why the same script is getting different results in relation to exactly the same file.

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