What is Perl?
Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple [...]
What modules are installed on the server?
Simply log into your Web Services Group Control Panel and select Web Diagnostics. Under that section you can then select ‘Module List’ which will list all the modules available on your server.
How do I upload a CGI script to my web space?
CGI scripts can be uploaded to anywhere in your hosting package, however it’s traditional to upload them into cgi-bin for security. Many CGI scripts are written in Perl. Here are some helpful tips to follow when installing Perl scripts: 1. Upload to your cgi-bin directory and ensure proper file permission settings (755) 2. Upload in [...]
Where do I put CGI or Perl scripts? Do they have to be in a specific directory?
Although we provide a cgi-bin as standard you do not need to put your CGI scripts in there. You can use CGI scripts in any directory, (although you can’t create another cgi-bin directory), but they must have a .cgi or .pl extension.
My CGI/Perl scripts are failing with error 500 (Internal Server Error)
These errors are nearly always related to a coding error within the script, or bad variables being passed into the script. If you encounter an error “500 Internal Server Error” whilst running your CGI and Perl scripts, try the following in order: – Ensure you have uploaded the script through FTP using ASCII mode (not [...]
Accesses to all files result in ’500 Internal Server Error’ messages
500 Internal Server Error messages on every page are typically an indication of a misconfigured site configuration file – such as a .htaccess or web.config file in your hosting package. If you’ve recently made changes to either of these files, it’s worth trying reverting to a previous version. Common errors include attempting to use php_value [...]
I get Zend Optimizer is not installed error message when running a script, I thought Zend was supported?
The component “Zend Optimizer” is not installed on the Linux hosting platform and therefore cannot service encoded files. Please download and install the Zend Optimizer Runtime (available without charge from http://www.zend.com) on your hosting package if you wish to use this. If you receive the above error when trying to run a script on our [...]
CGI scripts fail with ‘exec format error’
A CGI script must begin with a valid ‘interpreter line’ also called ‘shebang’. That must be the first line in the file and must start in the first column. It should begin with the two characters ‘#!’, followed by a path to an interpreter, followed by any options. For example: #!/usr/bin/php will run the script [...]
Why does my script produce a ‘file permissions error’?
CGI scripts need certain file permissions to be set if they are to work properly. In general CGI scripts need to have permissions on 755 (rwxr-xr-x), although PHP files only need 644 (rw-r–r–). The folders containing CGI scripts also need certain permissions. In particular, if a folder has very lax permissions, such as 777 (rwxrwxrwx), [...]
How do I edit php.ini (PHP settings) for my hosting package?
Becuase of the way in which we run PHP, you are able to customise its behaviour with php.ini files. These are plain text files (use Notepad if running Windows, TextEdit in Plain Text mode on Mac), which contain directives such as:- memory_limit = 24M A complete list of php.ini directives can be found here:- http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.list.php [...]