UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi everybody...
I'm trying to run some very simple cgi scripts on my server whilst I learn perl. Today is day 3 of that process, so I apologize in advance for not having enough knowledge to ask the right questions.

Any program I try to execute gives me an Internal Server Error (500) message. Even something as simple as 'helloworld.cgi' or .pl.

I've tried running such a simple program so that I can get one program up and running. My troubleshooting so far:
i. is the computer on?...yup
ii. can i upload HTML files to the server and have them work ?...yup
iii. what are the permissions for the stock cgis on the server ? Do those work for my program ? ....nope.
1. Doublecheck: uploaded in ASCII ? ....yup
2. Correct path to perl ?.....yup, confirmed by sysadmin
3. path to program is cgi-bin/learnperl/helloworld.cgi.

So I chmod the folder learnperl to 755, and the program helloworld.cgi to 755. No dice. Try the both with 751. 777. No dice.

Try them with all combinatorial possibilities for permissions.

Not working.

Anybody out there see what I'm missing ?
I keep putting quarters in the jukebox but nothing's coming out.

Help!

Thanks...

-Pascal

p.s. FTP client is FETCH for the mac.

check your httpd server.

heres a list of common error codes for html.
http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/writeus/error.html

i noticed you said uploaded in ascii, ive always thought that you should up load in binary, just an observation.

Is the web server apache? Make sure that there is a proper alias to the CGI sub-dir. I have ran into that before.

Code:

# ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts.
# ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that
# documents in the realname directory are treated as applications and
# run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the client.
# The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias directives as to
# Alias.
#
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"

Norsk: The reason for using ASCII over binary is automatic conversion from DOS to Unix formatting via FTP.

OK. This is embarassing. But for all you other newbies out there:

I uploaded everything in ASCII (text) format. Still got the errors.
I went through all combinatorial possibilities of chmod ### on the cgi.
Still Got the errors.

I made sure that the alias was correct. Still got the errors.

What caused the error ?

I know you're all dying to know ...

The first line of the program was blank.

Duh.

The second line was my shebang #!usr/bin/perl (often #!usr/local/bin/perl).

So make sure you check that, when you're uploading a file that you've written in BBedit, notepad or just saving a file from vim, pico whatever--make sure the first line's not blank.

It will save you at least 31 hours. Of course, you'll learn a lot less if you do it right the first time.

sheepishly,

paqi