Trouble Shooting

Life could be simpler but CGI scripts can cause one or two headaches. Transferring scripts and HTML from MAC to UNIX will cause a few headaches.

Below is listed a few common problems that should be checked if things are not working.

General problems (CGI running initially on Mac)

• CGI Script does not appear to run or work?
  • Is CGI script correct? Does it compile and run independently in Mac Perl?
  • Has the CGI (Perl) script been compiled and saved as CGI Script in Mac Perl?
  • Is the URL addressing the Script correct?
  • Is the FORM ACTION attribute correctly set?
  • Are the HTML and CGI Scripts in the right folders?
  • Are all CGI script component files in the same folder?

Problems after a successfully running CGI script on a Mac has been transferred to UNIX:

• CGI Script does not appear to run or work?
  • Is CGI script correct? Does it compile and run independently on the Mac in Mac Perl and as a CGI script on server?
  • Has the perl source (.pl file) been transferred and NOT the compiled Mac CGI (.cgi file) been tranferred (FTP) from the Mac.
  • Are the HTML and CGI Scripts in the right directories (project_html, project_cgi-bin, public_html or public_cgi-bin)?
  • Is the URL addressing the Script correct? Has it been changed since the Mac version was run. Macs and UNIX have differnt directory names and, hence, URL names.
  • Is the FORM ACTION attribute correctly set? Has it been changed since the Mac version was run.
  • Are all CGI script component files in the same cgi-bin folder?
  • Is the first line of Perl script #!/usr/local/bin/perl?