I've been at this problem for a few hours and it's been very frustrating. However before I get started I just want to thank everyone who can help me out or give some good advice. Thanks

So, I've spent the last half hour searching through this forum alone. I've spent over an hour going through google and other various forums as well. I've seen a lot of solutions already and tried them as well, and so far nothing so I'll try to list everything I have tried. So here goes.

My problem is with CGI/Perl scripts. For some reason even after httpd configuration and restarts and various other modifications to make this work...it just hasn't.

When I go to the script in my browser, I get the notorious "500 Internal Server Error" Which says:

So naturally, I check the log and I find an error (time stamps and specifics removed):

The first thing I do is check the permissions on first.pl,

I had already tried chmod 775, 777, just to make sure.

So permissions didn't work so I headed over to my httpd.conf to make sure I had the correct settings configured there. I need CGI/Perl access to each user's directory (public_html). Each user has a virtual host config setup, and they all work.

After checking this out I decided to have a look to make sure perl is actually in /usr/bin/perl and writable.

It is. Next, I went to test the actual script on my shell. Here is what first.pl is:

When I run it:

Yet, I still get the Internal Server Error when I go to it with the browser (Windows XP - IE v6 SP2).

Around this time I'm searching through google to find a solution, and one common problem was Suexec. I went ahead and found it in /usr/sbin/suexec and following the instruction on Apache website docs renamed it.

Keep in mind after each change in configuration I restarted httpd, even after this...no luck.

SELinux is not installed. It's a fresh install of RedHat Enterprise 9. I also want to mention that this _exact_ setup I have in my httpd.conf is working on my FC5 machine.

So now you know what I have done and haven't done. And again thank you all for your time and help. <3

Since your script is named first.pl, add the .pl extension above:

Hey thanks for your reply!

I did try that earlier with no luck...including setting it specifically to a directory in a user's public_html directory.

Although, I must say that even without the .pl extension set in the httpd.conf setting, it works fine for other *.pl files on my FC5 box which has the same httpd.conf setup.

What is the path to the perl script? Is it: /home/<myuser>/public_html/first.pl, i.e. there are "<" and ">" in the path, or you just used <myuser> to replace your actual username?

I used "<myuser>" (without quotes) to replace my actual username. So, no, "<" and ">" are not in the actual path.

Ok, so I've finally gotten something to work.

I added -w to #!/usr/bin/perl, so now it's: #!/usr/bin/perl -w

The scripts appear to have no problems running on Apache now! However, without the -w option, they don't work at all and I get an Internal Server Error. Right now the logs are spitting out a lot of errors however everything seems to be working just fine on the web end.

Any thoughts or advice here?

One last thought is that you created the script in windows using notepad or something like that and then you ftp'ed the file to your linux box using binary mode. So there are control characters (^M) from windows at the end of any line. Use
to see if that's the case, because plain vi or vim or other editors do not show the control characters.
I could not think of anything else since your apache config and the script look OK.

Regards

I am not sure if this will help you or not but I am learning CGI/Perl from the beginning and have been fighting the same issues that you have specified above. I got the same error and spent days working on my httpd.conf file trying to make it bend to my will but the computer won.

I am one of those kinds of people who believes in commenting everything I write, but this scripting language caught me at my own game. I wanted to write a comment describing what a bang statement was at the head of the file, above the actual bang statement. What I found out was that by placing a comment at the head of the file (INSTEAD OF THE BANG STATMENT - ) I got a similar error to yours, eventhough the script ran fine in the shell and it even said that the syntax was ok after running "perl -w first.cgi"

I figured that a comment would always be ignored but I was wrong and now my script runs fine.

I am using Red Hat Linux 9 and the book "CGI/Perl" by Diane Zak and the configuration settings she talks about are as follows:

***************************************
1. Remove # symbol from the line line.
2. Change the line to . "craig" in the previous statement is the username I have for this exercise - you replace it with your own.
3. Insert the line in the aliases section
4. Change to 5. Change to 6. If you need to, remove the # symbol from the beginning of the line line.
7. Insert the line in the AddType section of the file.

Save the file
make sure that the home directory (craig in my case), the public_html directory, the cgi-bin directory, and all files within the directories and subdirectories within those directories have permissions set to 755.
*****************************************

I hope this helps. I had such trouble getting this to work like you but it is now working. Keep trying, you will get it.