using includes or exec to call a CGI

[Al Hospers]

I have a CGI that reads a random text file and spits it back to whatever
calls it. I am trying to call it from a web page as an include or exec. any
help would be appreciated.

the cgi works fine when called in the browser as a url, here:

http://66.186.192.77/cgi-bin/quotes/quotemaster.cgi?

but when I embed it in the HTML it won't display. if I look at the source
that comes back I see something like:

<div align="center" class="quotesHeader">Quotes From the Edge</div>
<font color="#FFFFFF" size="1" face="Arial">
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
</font>

here are the two methods I have tried:

1) as a include in a shtml file:

<div align="center">Quotes From the Edge</div>
<font color="#FFFFFF" size="1" face="Arial">
<!--#include
virtual="http://66.186.192.77/cgi-bin/quotes/quotemaster.cgi"-->
</font>

2) as an exec in an shtml file

<div align="center">Quotes From the Edge</div>
<font color="#FFFFFF" size="1" face="Arial">
<!--#exec cgi="http://66.186.192.77/cgi-bin/quotes/quotemaster.cgi?"-->
</font>

the cgi compiles fine and I am using Strict. here is the actual cgi I
created:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

use constant BUFFER_SIZE     => 4_096;
use constant QUOTE_DIRECTORY => "../../httpdocs/quotes";

my $q = new CGI;
my $buffer = "";

my $quote = random_file( QUOTE_DIRECTORY, '\\.(txt)$' );
my( $type ) = $quote =~ /\.(\w+)$/;

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

local *QUOTE;
open QUOTE, QUOTE_DIRECTORY . "/$quote" or die "Cannot open file $quote:
$!";
read QUOTE, $buffer, BUFFER_SIZE;
close QUOTE;

print $buffer;

# close QUOTE;


# Takes a path to a directory and an optional filename mask regex
# Returns the name of a random file from the directory
sub random_file {
    my( $dir, $mask ) = @_;
    my $i = 0;
    my $file;
    local( *DIR, $_ );

    opendir DIR, $dir or die "Cannot open $dir: $!";
    while ( defined ( $_ = readdir DIR ) ) {
        /$mask/o or next if defined $mask;
        rand ++$i < 1 and $file = $_;
    }
    closedir DIR;
    return $file;
}



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