CGI: Premature end of script headers

true has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A buddy of mine is trying to run a perl script as a cgi in his school cgi-bin. He's on Sun Solaris and i was hoping someone knew something i didn't (which is almost ALWAYS the case:). I can ssh in and run the script fine from the command line. I found perl (whereis perl) on his machine, so it's not that. A simple hello world script returns internal server errors. His log sez "Premature end of script headers." I chmoded the file to 0755. Uploaded as ascii. Even tried creating a new cgi in pico just to be sure. Here's the code which will not run properly through a browser on Sun Solaris. Am i missing something? Thanks for reading!

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
print "hello";
[download]

jtrue

Retitled by davido.

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Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by fglock (Vicar) on Jan 20, 2005 at 02:18 UTC
You may have an html syntax error.	[reply]
Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by Errto (Vicar) on Jan 20, 2005 at 02:06 UTC
If he's running it from a personal cgi-bin directory, then quite likely it's running under suexec, which is extremely finnicky about permissions. In particular, the permissions in his cgi-bin directory (and his home directory, which I assume is cgi-bin's parent) should probably be set to 711 (though 755 might be ok). To see If the script really is running and it's just generating an error, add `use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/;` [download] near the top of the script.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by Tanktalus (Canon) on Jan 20, 2005 at 00:15 UTC
Given that it works fine using Apache on Linux, I'd have to wonder if you can get a look at the error_log for your server - that would help immensely in debugging the problem. I would hazard a guess and say that the system is not set up properly for CGI ;-)	[reply]
Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by true (Pilgrim) on Jan 20, 2005 at 01:06 UTC
this is the apache log output "Premature end of script headers." jtrue	[reply]
Re^2: CGI: Premature end of script headers by AJRod (Scribe) on Jan 20, 2005 at 01:49 UTC
Really know nothing about Solaris but try adding "-w" to the first line, as in: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w` [download] It sometimes helps when I shift between windows and linux OSs.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by ZlR (Chaplain) on Jan 20, 2005 at 08:22 UTC
My guess : he's not using the correct path for perl in the shebang.	[reply]
Re: CGI: Premature end of script headers by atcroft (Abbot) on Jan 20, 2005 at 18:19 UTC
Try inserting the following line between lines 2 and 3 of the code sample above: `$\| = 1;` [download] This will cause your output to be flushed immediately, rather than buffered (the default), which may help if an error is occurring and is arriving before the 'Content-type' header. HTH.	[reply] [d/l]