How can I troubleshoot my Perl CGI script?
Awhile ago I moved my How can I troubleshoot my Perl CGI script? to StackOverflow. I'm just getting around to telling everyone about it because it was pretty far down on my to do list.
I think this has almost pushed the old location on SourceForge out of the googlebrain, but it wouldn't hurt for people to link to it in a blog post, tweet, whatever to encourage Google to find this one. Someday SourceForge will disappear and we won't have to worry about it anymore. How is it even still alive? StackOverflow has pretty good googlejuice though, maybe because Google likes StackOverflow.
Since it's on StackOverflow, this also means that I'm basically letting go of it. StackOverflow encourages people to revise the questions and answers of other to improve them, and I've given it wiki status to encourage that even more. Take a look, see what I've left out (or left in), what's new and exciting (or old and boring).
Even if you don't (or can't) edit it just yet, I'd appreciate any comments on how to bring it up to date. Maybe another StackOverflow user can make the changes if I'm too busy.
Also, sadly, the only thing keeping the bad Perl info out of StackOverflow is a small band of knowledgeable Perlers patrolling the answers (Sinan used my summer absences to pass me as the highest rated Perl user there). If you're looking for a way promote Perl in a useful way (and you actually know Perl), consider helping out. Providing good answers, voting on good answers (and against bad answers), and refining other answers helps the entire world.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
Hi brian
Congrats. That's a very impressive list of steps to take to diagnose a problem.
I have 2 suggestions:
o If the program tries to load an external file, e.g. a HTML::Template-style template, the user needs to check and double-check the path and permissions of any such file.
o When relying on pre-installed (Perl) modules, I had a tiny CGI script which tried to load a set of desired modules (e.g. in BEGIN) and print their version numbers in a trivial HTML page. These days I'd start from scratch and use Module::Version which contains Module::Version::App, and emulate or even run its mversion program.
The point is to show that /any/ CGI script will actually run (the fundamental test), and that the expected modules are both available and have reasonable versions.