chromatic is correct. From the docs:

If POSTed data is not of type application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data, then the POSTed data will not be processed, but instead be returned as-is in a parameter named POSTDATA.

I'm not sure of all the curl command lines, but here's how I would test using LWP's lwp-request: 

lwp-request -m PUT -c 'text/xml'  -se 'http://localhost/cgi-bin/api.pl
+' < test.xml

[download]
One caveat though, it cannot be 'application/xml' either. For some reasons XForms overreached and managed to grab that generic content-type and CGI does some special processing for it.

-derby

update: And to properly handle PUTDATA, you need your CGI version to be greater that 3.30. That support was actually hacked our here in the monastery: REST Webservices and CGI.pm.

In reply to Re: Can't access {POST|PUT}DATA from CGI script by derby
in thread Can't access {POST|PUT}DATA from CGI script by vendion

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