well even if the file doesnt exist and you have -w and use strict set you still will not get a 500 error. for example 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;
print   $q->header,                    # create the HTTP header
        $q->start_html('Whatever'), # start the HTML

open(FILE, "data.txt")
  while(<FILE>){
     chomp;
     print "Saw $_ in data.txt<br>\n"; 
  }
  close FILE;  

print $q->end_html;

[download]
Will produce : 
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
        "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>W
+hatever</title>
Use of uninitialized value in print at ./test.pl line 8.
readline() on closed filehandle main::FILE at ./test.pl line 12.
</head><body></body></html>

[download]
if data.txt doesn't exist, which most browsers+servers will handle ok....
Of course I'm not saying you should do it like this :-) D

In reply to Re: Re: Re: file input problem by diarmuid
in thread file input problem by Anonymous Monk

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