I've been round this loop several times, and here is a quick checklist.

• Is the shebang (#!) line correctly formed and pointing to the correct directory for perl?
• Does the program clean compile under perl -c (others have mentioned this, but it is inclded for completeness)
• Does the WWW user have read and execute permissions on the script?
• Is there something in a BEGIN block failing? (depending on the logic, this might not be picked up by perl -c)

I suggest the following advice: sweet talk your sysadmin into giving you read permission on the Apache log. This may be only operative for a day, as many webserver boxes cycle the logs on a cron job.

Try also running your script from the command line:

perl myscript.cgi foo=1 bar=quux user=fred password=bloggs
[download]

CGI.pm picks up params off the command line if you use name=value pairs. You can also use -d to invoke the perl 5 debugger if you have a really tough problem.

Hope this helps

--rinceWind

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