Running CGI With Perl under Apache Permission Problem

Question

I have the following entry under apache2.conf in my Debian box.

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
Options +ExecCGI
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin/

<Directory /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin>
Options +ExecCGI -Indexes
allow from all
</Directory>

Then I have a perl cgi script stored under these directories and permissions:

nvs@somename:/var/www/mychosendir$ ls -lhR 
.:
total 12K
drwxr-xr-x 2 nvs nvs 4.0K 2010-04-21 13:42 cgi-bin

./cgi-bin:
total 4.0K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nvs nvs 90 2010-04-21 13:40 test.cgi

However when I tried to access it in the web browser:

http://myhost.com/mychosendir/cgi-bin/test.cgi

They gave me this error:

[Wed Apr 21 15:26:09 2010] [error] [client 150.82.219.158] (8)Exec format error: exec of '/var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin/test.cgi' failed
[Wed Apr 21 15:26:09 2010] [error] [client 150.82.219.158] Premature end of script headers: test.cgi

What's wrong with it?

Update:

I also have the following entry in my apache2.conf:

<Files ~ "^\.ht">
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</Files>

And the content of test.cgi is this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "Hello, world!\n";

Answer 1

Make sure you have a <Directory> section for the cgi-bin directory. And make sure "allow from all" is in it.

<Directory /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin>
    Options +ExecCGI -Indexes
    allow from all
</Directory>

Also...your ScriptAlias is for /cgi-bin/. Your URL is /mychosendir/cgi-bin. Unless you have some rewrite magic going on, your url should probably be http://my.host.com/cgi-bin/test.cgi , or you'll need to change your ScriptAlias line to look like

ScriptAlias /mychosendir/cgi-bin/ /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin

The error you posted in your update, sounds like you don't have a #! line at the beginning of your script. You'll need one, and it should look like

#!/path/to/your/perl

Answer 2

Are you sure the Apache user/group has read and execute access for the given files? Usually this user is called httpd or www-data.

Answer 3

"Premature end of script headers" means that the CGI script is not printing out the correct HTTP header. It needs to print out at least

Content-Type: text/html;

Also, you have

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin/

and yet you are asking for

http://myhost.com/mychosendir/cgi-bin/test.cgi

That should be

http://myhost.com/cgi-bin/test.cgi

or say

ScriptAlias /mychosendir/cgi-bin/ /var/www/mychosendir/cgi-bin/