almut,

congrats (and ++) ... you just tought an old dog a new trick. 10+ years in UNIX/Linux and I've never seen the ld-linux trick (well i may have but forgotten). i like it, thanks!!

no time to get into the rest ... never tried setting ENV vars in a .htaccess, not saying you're wrong, just never tried it. in a nutshell, my basic argument against the rest of the post is that if bobb doesn't have access enough to do the things suggested, he certainly won't have access to the httpd.conf, apachectl or global LD_LIBRARY_PATH (i know you suggest against it as i would agree). on the .htaccess ENV thing, would that work? the file would be in some user's directory but httpd would most likely not be running as that user. i've never needed to look but this would make sense only if the CGI was executed as the user who owned it, not the user running the httpd process (nobody, daemon whomever).

anyway, thanks for the cool trick and for making me think!!

--marc