From: ahoward <ahoward@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T02:53:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Basic CGI question

On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, Mark Probert wrote:

> I'm just starting to play with cgi and forms. I have a simple script
> which runs okay, except that the page changes to 500: Internal Server
> Error, with the error message "Premature end of script headers" on
> the script.
>
> Search, this seems to be a permissioning problem.  Permissions are 755.
> Ideas?

if the cgi runs from the command line, but does not from the browser, chances
are that user nobody (or www or whatever) does not have permission to *write*
to the specified directory.  two things which generally help me alot with
cgis are

  * get sudo su nobody permission - run all your scripts from the command line
    as user nobody (or www, or whatever apache runs as)

  * when all else fails, make everything 777 (chmod -R 777) and run again, if
    that works the problem IS a permissions one, track it down and gradually
    shut permissions down untill it stops working - you found the  problem

    i KNOW many will freak out at that suggestion, like about half the
    developers in our group, but i've solved at LEAST 50 or 60 bugs that way
    in under a minute - in every case the developer just didn't want to go 777
    on principle, but there is no problem with this, IMHO, if it's *temporary*.

-a

-- 

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 | Ara Howard
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