Re: Problem writing to a file

[drieux]

On Wednesday, Sep 17, 2003, at 11:59 US/Pacific, John Park wrote:
[..]
This is what my script looks like:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
...
...
open(FILE,">newfile.txt") || die("newfile.txt: $!"); #script stops 
here due to permissions

[..]

that is the correct syntax - although you might
not want to 'die()' in a CGI script - but let us defer that.
{ especially if you have already dealt with CGI::Carp }
Remember that most web servers are running as the
web-server uid - www or apache - and so can only 'write'
where that uid has 'write permission'. It can of course
read/execute anything that is 'world readable/executable'
but as a general rule of sanity, it is NOT WISE to make
those directories 'world writable'. So when the code
executes as www, it has no problem reading IN any files
that it can read - but you really would not want to allow
it to over-write your own CGI code and/or fill up the
disk with a bunch of files, because each run of the
CGI code needs to be different...
You might try something like

        open(FILE, ">/tmp/newfile.txt") || die("newfile.txt: $!");
        ....
assuming that the system allows users to write files there.
and then have some other piece of CGI code 'read'
from that file to verify that the file actually was written.
The alternative is to provide a directory that is world
writable so that you can create the file in that directory
outside of where you have the actual CGI
        open(FILE, "> ../tmp/newfile.txt") || die("newfile.txt: $!");
        ....
so you layout would look like

        ../cgi_bin/my.cgi
        ../tmp/newfile.txt
Or you may want to look at say

	perldoc IO::File

and specifically new_tmpfile() if you really only need
a quick temporary file.
ciao
drieux
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