Hey guys...
I have good news and bad news... (for me anyway )
Good new:
After many bashes of the head against the nearest brick wall I finally figured out why my CGI scripts sometimes don't work on some machines...

It turns out that the reason is if I edit the perl script on a windows box and upload it, it now is DOS formatted... this seems to be a bad thing for apache anyway on linux machines...
So to fix it I have found that I can copy the text out of the newly edited DOS formatted file and paste it into a file that I made on a linux machine... then save the new file over the old one...
Cool.. this seems to work... however I was looking for a less crude way of doing it... after a little searching I found that there
is a command dos2unix... I thought this would be the answer.. however it didn't quite work for me... Soooooo... I need a better solution...

the PERL scripts that work show up in EMACS with the litte "u" on the left side of the message bar at the bottom of the window... After I use dos2Unix on a file I don't get a "u" or a "(DOS)"... and I still get the same error from apache "Premature end of script headers".... the above solution does fix this but its a crappy fix...

this overly long winded question can be brought down to a few...
"Any ideas?"

oh.. and after each conversion I did check to make sure that the file permissions were set properly... so that isn't the problem

thanks so much for your help!!

-Jake

Take a look at NoteTab lite:
http://www.notetab.com

It can save files in UNIX format.

thanks for the suggestion! I will definatly look into it, however
I was looking for a way to do it in linux... thanks!

-Jake

Look - I have no idea of specifics , but your problem revolves around <CR> <LF> and dos to nix conversion as per my own experience - I could very well be wrong. Anyway - what I used to do was a small script - put in ascii and bring back in binary (perhaps the other way around - forgot now ) at the windows command prompt for 2 or 3 times. It works fine and can be automated when your lan has any nix box . Also most ftp s/w have options for crlf conversion , yu can explore that.
Hope this helps you .

To convert DOS text to Unix text, at the console:

perl -i.bak -pe "s[\x0d\x0a][\x0a]g" <filename>

Note that <filename> can include wild cards. Your original file will be backed up with a .bak extension.

Also note that it's ZERO D and ZERO A, not OH D and OH A.

here's what I use
(dos to unix)

sed -e s/'\r'// yourDosFile > newFile