Cannot save to file with a CGI scipt

[chuleto1]

Hello Monks:
I am having problems saving some params to a file ( printing();)($file, look at the code). The funny thing is the when I run the code (>perl file.pl ) a file is created. This is what I get in the apache server error log "Cannot save file /var/www/html/datfiles/data.dat at /var/www/cgi-bin/results.pl line 48. ". Please help!

#file.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI::Cookie;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;
my $file = "/var/www/html/datfiles/data.dat";
 print
                $cgi->header( -cookie => new CGI::Cookie(-name => 'Cho
+colateChip',
                                                        -value=> $cgi-
+>param('color'),
                                                        -expires => 'T
+hu, 26-Sep-2002 00:00:00 GMT'#,
                                                        #-domain => 's
+tudents.byu.edu',
                                                        #-path => '/'
                                                                     )
                        );



print
    $cgi->start_html(-title => 'Results',
                        -bgcolor => $cgi->param('color'));



if ($cgi->param())
{
    print
            $cgi->center(
            $cgi->h3("Hello: ".
            $cgi->param('name')),
               $cgi->p,
            "The keywords are: ",join(", ",$cgi->param('words')),
            $cgi->p,
            "Your favorite color is: ",$cgi->param('color'));

        
    

}
    printing();
print

        $cgi->end_html();

sub printing
{
    open(FILE, ">$file")|| die "Cannot save file $file ";
        print "test";
        print FILE $cgi->param('name');
        print FILE join(", ",$cgi->param('words'));
        print FILE $cgi->param('color');
        close FILE;

}

[valdez]

The funny thing happening here is that your web server runs under a different user, usually apache|nobody|www. Probably the directory you are trying to write into is owned by you and not by the user that runs httpd. So, if you check $! you will probably see a permission denied error.
The solution is to change the owner of the directory where your script will write its files. Now you need to discover who should be the owner :)

Ciao, Valerio

[kabel]

print the variable $! in the die () call. the scalar contains the error string and will help you finding the error.

[George_Sherston]

I think valdez is likely to be right - unless it's something even simpler, like the filepath you specified is wrong or incomplete. My only suggestion is that if you are looking in the error log for your error messages, then you could save yourself some trouble by putting

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);
print $cgi->header;
warningsToBrowser(1);

near the top of your code during development - it'll chuck your fatal errors (and your warnings if you put  -w at the end of your shebang line) onto the browser where you can see 'em in real time.

§ George Sherston

[hacker_j99]

I found this out the hard way
the permissions on the data file need to be set at least to 766 to allow writing and reading

here is a sample code that I was working on simular...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
$data = new CGI;
$email = $data->param('email');


$datafile ="/full_path/data2.txt";

open (FORUM, "<$datafile");
@lines = <FORUM>;
close (FORUM);

$email="eww";
open (FORUM, ">$datafile");
print FORUM ("EMAIL");


print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "$email";



Hacker_J99
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