Hello, all.

I have a sticky bit of a problem. We are running our webserver with all of our individual hosted domains running within their own chroot jail. In the process of trying to set up Awstats for our own domain (for the ISP I work at), we (meaning myself and the senior admin here) discovered that Perl is not running anything inside of backticks while within the chroot jail. As you can guess, this might pose a problem.

We tried researching the issue, only to find basically nothing out there on this issue or how to fix it. If anyone has any clues they can pass along to us, it would be greatly appreciated.

I should take this opportunity to point out that the entire Perl installation is within the chroot jail, one installation per domain. The entire web and FTP servers also run from within the jail in their entirety.

Thank you for your help.

Okay, you're all going to love this one.

Backticks are working. The issue was that Perl could not find the executable we wanted it to run (pwd). The funny thing was, if you dropped into the command line under the chroot jail, pwd ran just fine. But when we looked for the executable under the jailed directory, it wasn't there. The only thing we can think of is bash was answering the request for pwd rather than firing the executable.

Well, we have our issue solved now, we think, so thanks for your help anyway.

Yes, bash has a bult-in pwd command and it'll be used by default unless you explicitly ask for the external program.

And why aren't you just using the Cwd module? It looks like it ends up using /bin/pwd anyway, but your code would be more portable.