[sf-perl] perl on a mac

[Dan Lyke]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 07:22:21 -0800
Walt Sanders <wsanders at pacificwebdesign.org> wrote:
> Terminal won't run it of course, it just spits that code back at
> me. But, if I try to run it in a browser, of try to preview it in an  
> editor, it still spits code back at me.  This is any program that
> runs perfectly fine when I upload it to any one of my ISP servers.

Right. You need to either:

1. Pipe the output to an html file (although you'll need to strip the
"Content-Type: text/html\n\n" first two lines). For instance:

   stuff.cgi > output.html
   perl -npi.bak -e 's/^Content-Type: .*$//;' output.html

   And then open output.html in your web browser. If this is a Mac, you
   could do "open output.html", on a Gnome based Linux machine, you'd
   do "gnome-open output.html". Or, in either machine (or even Windows),
   you can have that folder opened and double-click on output.html.

2. Run this under a web server on your local machine.

> I can just download any working .cgi or .pl from one of my
> websites and it won't run on my machine.

When you say "won't run", what's the *exact* (copied and pasted) output
you get from one of these programs. Does it look like:

danlyke at danhplaptop:~$ ./test.pl 
bash: ./test.pl: /usr/share/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or
directory danlyke at danhplaptop:~$

If so, then the Perl interpreter on your web server is in a different
place than on your Mac. However, it's fairly clear that you're a
relative newbie (no harm in that, just gotta be more specific), so
phrases like "Doesn't work" and "won't run" don't help us to debug the
problem for you.

Dan