I want to run a bash script within a perl script using perl-cgi

1. User will enter a number in the form page
2. Form will call a URL pointing to a .pm program
3. pm script runs and processes a bash program

I can't get my action page to write a file: /var/www/cgi-bin/date.txt
See below.
Anyone knows how.

1. Form page:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

print
$cgi->header() .
$cgi->start_html(-title =>'Testing the Form') .
$cgi->h1('Test Forms using PERL!') .
$cgi->startform ('POST', '/cgi-bin/processForm.pm') .
$cgi->textfield(-name=>'username', -default=>'Admin', -size=>'10', -maxlength
=>'10') .
$cgi->submit(-name=>'submit', -value=>'Send') .
$cgi->endform () .
$cgi->end_html;

exit (0);

2. Action page

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

print
$cgi->header() .
$cgi->start_html(-title =>'Form Results') .
$cgi->h1('Form Results using PERL!') ;
my $user = $cgi->param('username');
print "<H4>";
print "$user</H4><H4>\n";
exec("/var/www/cgi-bin/echoDate.sh");
print "</H4>\n";
print $cgi->end_html;

exit (0);

3. Bash program

#/bin/sh
echo $(date "+%d %b %Y") >> /var/www/cgi-bin/date.txt
#touch /var/www/cgi-bin/hello.txt

There's a much better way to get a date string than shelling out to the date command... See the manual page for the Date::Format module.

Thanks for replying. The script above is to test a concept. The actual bash script will contain several commands which may need to write to a log file. If I don't write the part ">> <file>", the date shows in the response page. But if I add that part, I expect the date to be written into the file.

When you use exec() to launch your bash script, the perl script terminates. If you really want to do it this way (and I can't imagine why you would ever want to drop to a bash script from perl), you can either fork() a child process to launch the shell script, or use the system() perl command, use the `backtick` format of the command, or...

Probably, your cgi-bin directory is [correctly] configured with permissions disallowing writes by the web server. To allow Write-Execute permission would be a security issue. Use a directory with no execute permission.
--- rod.

Thanks theNbomr.

No more BASH in my scripts, just PERL.

You were right, Apache was running as "apache", and the log files in /var/log/* were showing write permission errors.

Getting the script to work is a matter of setting the right permissions.