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I am working with an Apache2/Redhat5.5 configuration. I am trying to configure (and learn) how to run Perl scripts which is new to me.

In my httpd.conf file I made these changes and/or notice these settings:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.cgi index.pl
...
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
...
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"
...
<Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride None
    Options None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

I have placed this script: http://www.seaglass.com/downloads/file_upload.pl into the /var/www/cgi-bin/ directory.

I then point my browser to myIpAddress/cgi-bin/file_upload.pl and get a "internal server error ... The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to..."

I then check the error log to find this:

[Sun Nov 27 19:59:02 2011] [error] [client ***] (2)No such file or directory: exec of '/var/www/cgi-bin/file_upload.pl' failed
[Sun Nov 27 19:59:02 2011] [error] [client ***] Premature end of script headers: file_upload.pl
[Sun Nov 27 19:59:02 2011] [error] [client ***] File does not exist: /var/www/html/favicon.ico
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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Assuming that you have SELinux enabled, turn on CGI with:

setsebool -P httpd_enable_cgi on

This assumes that the script is uploaded correctly. Perl scripts don't run too well if they are either saved in a DOS format or are uploaded via binary mode via ftp. If you didn't copy the file via ftp (but instead scp or sftp), convert the file with:

dos2unix file_upload.pl
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As it turns out, the problem had something to do with the text not being in the right format. And, I have been uploading with sftp. For the benefit of others, Something must have happened when I downloaded the script to my windows machine. Simnply copying it over to a new .pl file in Notepad++ (an IDE) seems to have fixed it... the exact same file! Thanks for the tips. – Roger Nov 27 '11 at 21:57
Sure. BTW, sftp is fine. So most likely it is the file not being in the correct text format. – Rilindo Nov 27 '11 at 21:59
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up vote 0 down vote

This to me sounds like you might not have perl installed on your machine, or that it might be at a path different than /usr/bin/perl. Try typing /usr/bin/perl -v at a command line to comfirm that perl is in fact installed.

It's also possible that you're missing execute permissions on /var/www/cgi-bin/file_upload.pl.

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Thanks. Regarding the first suggestion: I typed usr/bin/perl -v and received "No such file or directory". However, I should say that I have a SOAP .pl files running in the same cgi-bin directory and that this SOAP file is regularly called by a SOAP client with "myIpAddress/cgi-bin/scriptName.pl" and it has been working fine for a few months. Regarding the second suggestion, I am not sure if this is pertinent, but I did run chmod +x file_upload.pl and the command line made no complaints when I ran it. – Roger Nov 27 '11 at 20:42
Scratch that first half of my previous reply. I just ran /usr/bin/perl -v and it shows perl v5.8.8 is running. (I made an error by leaving out the first "/".) – Roger Nov 27 '11 at 20:48
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