CGI/PERL

I'm trying to learn PERL/CGI but i can't get it to work under Apache 1.3.14.[under windows 98 and activeperl]. I've changed the directory i wanted to run it in under options like so

<Directory "C:/windows/desktop/webpages">
Options ALL +MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

That lets me excute cgi scripts under the directory but i keep getting a 500 error. It seems like, atleast to me, that the server can't find perl.exe.

My root working directory for apache is the directory you see above but perl is in c:\perl\ could that be a problem? Also i changed the following::
==================
# can execute this specific script. For a perl script, with perl.exe in
# the C:\Program Files\Perl directory, the shebang line should be:

#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
=================

which i also add it to the file. The file works fine when i run it from the command line. Is there anything else i need to change in my httpd.conf?

p.s i also added this
=======
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler cgi-script .pl
=======


Any help would be appreciated

Thanks,
Cisk

Create a ScriptAlias for your cgi-bin directory, like so:

ScriptAlias /perl-bin/ "C:/path to/your/perlscripts"

And also make sure that your perl script is not the
one casuing the server error. If you are sending output
to the browser, remember to set the outgoing Content-Type header to text/html like so:

# set the content type headers to text/html along with
# the required two 'newlines', i.e. "\n\n";
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";

# HTML print statements

And of course, check the server error_log files for hints
of why your are getting the 500 Server Error message.

good luck

-Carlos

Thanks carlos,

I tried adding:
ScriptAlias /perl-bin/ "C:/path to/your/perlscripts"

but it did not work. I also have: print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n"; on top and it still outputs an error. I checked my error logs and this is what i get:


[Wed Feb 28 16:55:21 2001] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] couldn't spawn child process: :/windows/desktop/webpages/test.pl
[Wed Feb 28 16:55:24 2001] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] couldn't spawn child process: :/windows/desktop/webpages/test.cgi

the perl code is only
print "hello";

So it can't be the code not working, i don't know what else to do. I can run it find using "perl.exe test.pl" but i would like it to work with apache.

any ideas?
Cisk

Well it finally works.

I chaged
#!c:\Perl\bin\
to
#!c:\Perl\bin\perl

and it works. I didn't think of changing that because i had already tried changing it a few times with no luck but the print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n"; is what did the trick!!!!!!!!


Thanks a lot Carlos
Cisco