I've figured out that the only thing that could possibly be wrong with my CGI is that I must have copied it into the directory in non-ASCII (I edited the script on a windows machine).

Normally people FTP the script into the network with ASCII conversion, but I haven't hooked the web server up yet, and am just doing this through floppy disk.

The question:- Is there any program to convert a document from whatever-it-was to ASCII within Linux? that would be helpful.

"dos2unix" or open the file in vi, then type w/o quotes ":se ff=unix" enter, type ":wq" to close and save.

What do you mean by non-ASCII? If you used notepad then the above post will work. If you used wordpad or word and saved it as a text document then again the above post will work.

If it is a word document then maybe openoffice or staroffice will convert it from a word document to a text document. If that doesn't work then you will need to go back and save the file as a text document on the windows PC and then convert using the above post.

The difference between a linux ASCII text file and a DOS ASCII text file is that DOS uses both a carriage return and line feed character i.e. 0x0A, 0x0D and linux just uses 0x0A. Thats why you will see a ^M on the end of each line if you open up a DOS text file in linux.