JoeJaz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi everyone, Does anyone happen to know of a way to set perl to pass a CGI script POST or GET data from the command line. My friend says that he has used command line switch to put perl into some interperater mode so he could pass perl variable value pairs in the same way that a CGI script could, and therefore test the CGI script from the command line without building a form or adding code to the script. We cannot seem to find such an option in the man pages, however. If anyone has any information as to if this is actually possible and would be willing to share it, I would be very greatful. Thank you very much for reading this. Have a nice day, Joe

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI Command Line
by barrachois (Pilgrim) on Apr 12, 2004 at 21:16 UTC
    Use the CGI.pm module and follow the directions in its debugging documentation.

    For example, if your script is in the file color.cgi 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
my $color=param('color');
print "Your chosen color is $color.\n";

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    then from the command line you can type 
     ./color.cgi color=red
    to see it run as it would from a URL like color.cgi?color=red

    - barrachois

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      I also like using Data::Dumper when debugging my CGI scripts. 
      #!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use Data::Dumper;
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
my $color=param('color');
print Dumper($color);
exit;
print "Your chosen color is $color.\n";

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      # ./color.cgi color=red
Content-type: text/plain

$VAR1 = 'red';

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      It's useful when the script is big and all you want is to check a variable in a middle of it.
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        Ooh! Very nice! That's soo much easier that writing my own code to do that type of debugging. Thanks for the tip! Joe
[reply]
      I didn't realize that it was that simple. That's very useful Thanks a lot! Joe
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Re: CGI Command Line
by pbeckingham (Parson) on Apr 12, 2004 at 21:14 UTC

    For Unix, try: 

    export QUERY_METHOD=GET
export QUERY_STRING="name=value&x=1"

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    then run your CGI program.

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      Thanks very much! I'll give that a try right away. I appreciate your time. Joe
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Re: CGI Command Line
by bassplayer (Monsignor) on Apr 12, 2004 at 21:16 UTC
    /usr/bin/perl script_name.pl name_1=value_1 name_2=value_2 ... name_n=value_n

    bassplayer

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      If only I had know that 6 months ago when I was doing CGI for work ;-) Thanks for your post! Your help is really appreciated. Joe
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        If your values contain spaces, you'll either have to use quotes or escape the spaces with backslashes, like this: 
        ./script.pl name="some value with spaces"

./script.pl name=some\ value\ with\ spaces

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