you might want to read perlopentut's ( do perldoc perlopentut ) Pipe Open section, which talks about the diffictulties in finding if a command opened through open() failed or not

I tend to think that since it worked from your command line and not the CGI, the user id for httpd doesn't have the proper permissions or something of that sort.

My $0.02


In reply to Re: backticks in CGI by lestrrat
in thread trouble populating array with input from a file by maderman

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