What everyone else said, and a couple of other things.

You should check the permissions on *every* directory up to the root, if you haven't already.

Another thing I find useful when I'm ripping my hair out, is and this works only if you have root access to the machine, is to run strace on the web server on Linux. On Solaris, use truss.

The command would be:

strace -f apachectl start

or

truss -f apachectl start
[download]

This may produce a lot of output, so you can redirect the output to to a logfile.

Update: jeffa suggested I mention redirecting STDERR, but you don't have to do that, you can use the "-o" option to direct the trace output to a logfile. "-o logfilename" works with both strace and truss.

One can then use less or tail -f to look at the logfile. STDERR and STDOUT will then appear with the running process as usual.

This method of testing works equally well for any script you might write in addition to CGI.

Another cool option is using "-p" to attach to a running process.

Mike - mps@discomsys.com

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen... and stupidity."
Harlan Ellison