AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH ... okay now that I have that out of the way :). I'm trying to convert MS Word documents uploaded by a client to PDF files. First I used Antiword to convert the Word doc to a Postscript file and then tried using ps2pdf to take the Postscript and turn it into the PDF. This setup works perfectly from the command line but when I try running it as a CGI script the ps2pdf command chokes and doesn't really give much to go on. When I've called it directly I get error 127. Which I understand is often "Command not found" at least in the shell, but the command certainly exists so I suspect that for ps2pdf it means something else (though I've been unable to locate any documentation on that). If I envoke a shell to run it from within Perl I get an exit value of 2. Which I've read to be "Invalid use of shell builtins" (huh?). So I'm very confused. Has anyone run into this problem before. Is there a different program I could use to convert the Postscript to PDF? (I tried using wvPDF but the output was not correct).

Anyway, here's some code:

use strict;
use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';

print "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n";

# Change to the directory where I want the final output
# stored (this seems to help antiword work correctly)

chdir('/path/to/my/pdfs') or die "Couldn't change directory: $!\n";

# Antiword only outputs to STDOUT so I just decided to use 
# backticks to capture the output. In the real program I 
# check and make sure no one is doing anything funny with 
# the filename
my $postscript = `/usr/local/bin/antiword -m 8859-1.txt -p letter /tmp
+/worddoc.doc`;

# since more than one person could be working on this at
# a single time make sure we have a unique name for the 
# temp file
my $tmpfile = "";
my $count = 0;
{
    $tmpfile = "pdftmp$count.ps";
    $count++;
    redo if -e "/tmp/$tmpfile";
}

# save the postscript to the temp file
open(TMPFILE,">/tmp/$tmpfile") or die "Couldn't open $tmpfile: $!\n";
print TMPFILE $postscript;
close(TMPFILE);

# Convert the Postscript to pdf (here's where we choke)
system("/usr/local/bin/ps2pdf","/tmp/$tmpfile","test.pdf") == 0 or die
+ $? >> 8;

print "Done\n";
[download]

UPDATE: the problem was a difference in the PATH between the shell environment and the CGI environment. Abigail-II is my hero :). Next time I'll get more sleep before coding