syntax error at deleteme.pl line 9, near "= ;"
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I'm not going to offer any more help because you should easily be able to diagnose the issue for yourself from here.

When you get "500 Internal Server Error", you can usually find the cause of the problem in the server log files. There are a number of things that could cause this problem and some of them are platform dependent.

If you're using Apache on *nix, look for a file named error_log. If you're using Apache on Windows, it's probably error.log. For other servers, I don't know.

... Now I'll take a look at your code and let you know if I see anything significantly wrong. There might not be anything, though. You need the error message from that log file to tell you what's wrong.

--
-- GhodMode

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
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Second, I find it hard to believe you can delete files on this host but that you can't create any. On most systems, your home directory or the /tmp directory is writeable by you. If you truly can't create any files anywhere then your script is never going to work because your own code is creating a file.

Third, CGI::Carp can't display compile time errors to the browser without a little help. For that you would need to bypass the web server log. See this for details. It assumes that you really can create a file.

Fourth, you should still be able to validate that the script compiles even if you don't have perl locally or a shell account on the host. Create a new script that executes a system call to perl -wc of the first script. Since you are unlinking files and opening pipes to external mail programs - I don't see why this wouldn't work.

I do hope that you can get things to work. If none of these other pieces of information are helpful then try a completely different approach. Start out with a working script that doesn't nothing more than prints "hello, world" to the browser screen. Next add on a single bit of information and test it. Continue this process until you find exactly what the problem is or you get a working solution.

Update:
I have taken the liberty of re-writing your code to something I know compiles and corrects some of the logic problems of your own. I say some because you have a race condition that you will have to address on your own if it is a real issue. Use this at your own risk as it comes with no guarantees.

If that is not an option for you, I'd suggest:

1. you install perl on your PC. I assume you're running some version of Windows, in which case there are many different perl distributions available. I'm happy with and would recommend ActiveState Perl. You can then run the scripts on your PC to test with perl -wc your-script-name-here.pl from the command prompt, then upload it to the server. It obviously won't be the same thing as what they have on the server, but at least you don't have to keep asking to look at the logfile for trivial errors. (To get a command prompt, go to start->run->type cmd->click OK).

2. Asking your hosting provider what perl modules they have available for you to use. One good one is Mail::Sendmail; a quick search on search.cpan.org also turns up others.

In addition to the excellent advice you have already received about installing Perl on your work machine, you may also wish to look at the following alternatives:

Portable perl: usb thumbdrive
Never without (win32) perl

HTH,

The posted code does not contain any logic to print a message like "failed to open log file"; if you now have a modified version of your script that includes this sort of message, that is what's causing that error message.

As for the logic that is posted, there are problems:

• If you have somehow manually created a file called "report.txt" and made sure it had global write access, then your script should not do this:

  if (($ENV{QUERY_STRING} eq "new") && (-e $file)){unlink($file);}
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  That deletes the file. Once it is deleted, the script might not have permission to create it again (the "web user" account running the script would need write access on that directory, which might be a bad idea, or at least, might not be allowed).

• I don't understand why you are sending the same message, with all the same information to the same recipient, twice.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $mailprog = '/usr/lib/sendmail';
my $mail = 'recipient-email@adress.com';
my $from = 'sender-email@address.com';
my $file = 'report.txt';
my $num;

if ($ENV{QUERY_STRING} ne "new" and -f $file) {
    open (DATA, $file);
    $num = <DATA>;
    close (DATA);
    $num =~ s/\D+//g;
}
$num ||= 0;

if ( open (MAIL, "|$mailprog -t")) {
    print MAIL "Content-Type: text/plain; charset = windows - 1251\n";
    print MAIL "Subject: Text, Text!\n";
    print MAIL "To: $mail\n";
    print MAIL "From: $from\n\n";
    print MAIL "Hello, the message text itself..\n";
    print MAIL "\n\n";
    close (MAIL);
    $num++;
} else {
    $num = "Unable to use $mailprog";
}

if ( open (DATA, ">$file")) {
    print DATA $num;
    close (DATA);
} else {
    my $might = ( -e $file ) ? 'does' : 'does not';
    $num .= "<br>Unable to write to $file (it $might exist).";
}
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "$num\n";
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Meanwhile, if there's a problem with opening the "report.txt" file for output, it will tell you about that, too; if you want it to report about not being able to open this file for input, you should be able to figure that out. If your ultimate goal is to send a set of emails to different people (or the same message to the same person a bunch of times), just add the appropriate loop around that middle "if/else" block.