Hmmm, thats correct. My code was as simple as

print <<P1;
Content-type:text/plain

<some stuff>
P1
[download]

And it works fine sometimes, gives a blank page another times. Maybe this is an http server problem.

Thanks to all again,

Ricardo

The key to your problem will be in the error logs.

I will just reiterate what others have said. You won't have *lost* STDOUT. If your script does not print a valid header to STDOUT then you *will* get a 500 Internal Server Error. The fact that you get a blank screen means you have output a header but that your script has not sent anything (to STDOUT) after that header.

The possible reasons are that it dies somewhere or you have a logic error. The answers will lie in the error logs +/- adding some debugging warns (these will appear in the error logs to) so you can trace program flow. If the error logs are empty (as you say they currently are) first add a line like warn "Sanity Check!\n" and make sure you see it in the error log. If you don't see it find the correct logs (look in httpd.conf*). If that works so you truly know you have no logged errors then you have a logic error that leads to your script exiting cleanly without actually doing what you expect. *Note you can have multiple httpd.conf files lurking on a system, sanity check you are looking at the right one by adding a syntax error and restarting the server (it won't start if it is the active file).

See CGI Help Guide.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=reopen+STDOUT&hl=en&lr=&selm=m14skhbfak.fsf%40halfdome.holdit.com&rnum=6

Addition

As an aside, if you were not doing CGI and could count on your code being launched from a commandline shell, you *might* be able to get away with something like this.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use AtExit;

$_ = atexit(sub {
  open STDOUT, ">/dev/tty" or die;
  print "bar\n";
});

close STDOUT;
exit 0;
[download]

But that's not a great approach. Caching the file descriptor is a better approach, but as prior poster noted, this probably isn't the problem anyway ... its just slow at work today and I thought I'd dummy some code up and post.

,welchavw