the program Page 3

Our program will not do anything terribly useful. It
is a simple
program that will illustrate some essential aspects of installing a Perl
program, while
acquainting you with your FTP program and some basic Perl syntax. Our
program is designed
to be called as a server side include (it is called invisibly from a web
page and will
record some basic information). The first step of our installation will
require very
little configuration and will test to see if you uploaded the file
correctly and set the
correct permissions. Let’s begin by looking at the program (it is
available here for download). Open the program up in your text
editor and
examine the first couple lines of your program, which should read:

1 #!/usr/bin/perl
2 # This line says “Hey, Man, I’m a
Perl program!”
3 # It points to the Location of the Perl
Interpreter on your
server.
4 # This tells the server that your program
5 # needs to be interpreted/executed
6 # Some windows environments will not
require this line

The first line tells the server that the program
needs to be
interpreted and points to the location of Perl on your server. You should
consult your ISP
to find the exact path (sometimes it is #!/usr/local/bin/perl). Lines 2-6
are standard
Perl comments. Anything after the # is considered a comment and is not
processed by the
Perl interpreter (the first line being the exception). A comment can appear
anywhere in a
Perl program, even after a valid expression. If you have the program
pointing to the
correct location of Perl on your system we can now upload it (in ASCII or
text mode) to
the server. Some ISP’s or servers require that you place all of your
scripts in the
/cg-local/ or /cgi-bin/ directory, while others will allow you to execute a
script in any
folder or directory. You should again consult your ISP to find out. After
you upload the
script to the appropriate directory, let’s set it’s permissions, or
chmod the file 755
as in the above matrix example.

After you have done this, it is time to see if you
have done it
right. Launch your Internet browser and type in the URL to your script
(http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/script.cgi?exec). You will notice that I
added on a
query string at the end of the script name. By adding the ? and the word
exec, I am calling
a specific function of the script, or passing it a query string. If the
script was
uploaded correctly and the permissions were correctly set you should
see:

Hey, Man, it worked!
I’m executed!
Wednesday April 29, 1998

If it worked, congratulations! If it didn’t
work, skip ahead to
the trouble shooting section to see if you can figure out what is wrong.