[Discuss] Weird Apache backticks problem

[Noel Burton-Krahn]

This may be a job for strace.  That will reveal all the system calls perl 
goes through and where it hangs.  Try this:

strace -f perl -e 'print `ls`'


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Scott" <Peter at PSDT.com>
To: <discuss at vlug.org>
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 9:41 AM
Subject: [Discuss] Weird Apache backticks problem


> Hi, I thought I'd try here first on this.  I'm installing TWiki on a 
> server that I don't control, and I have boiled a bizarre problem down to 
> this: a (perl) program that executes a command in backticks will work in 
> the cgi-bin directory, but hang elsewhere.  The program is no longer than
>
> print `/bin/ls`;
>
> (after the content-type header) and it makes no difference what the 
> command in the `` is.  If I put anything else besides backticks in the 
> program it executes properly.  I have a .htaccess in the directory with a 
> SetHandler cgi-script directive.  The cgi-bin directory has no .htaccess 
> file.  The other directory is not a child of the cgi-bin but is a couple 
> of levels under htdocs, a sibling of cgi-bin.
>
> I got nowhere Googling this.  There were some postings alleging a similar 
> problem on Windows servers but this is Linux (something called vux by the 
> look of it).  As a last resort I will have to figure out how to install 
> TWiki by moving its programs to a cgi-bin directory out of its main tree, 
> but I'd still like to know what the heck is going on here.
> -- 
> Peter Scott
> Pacific Systems Design Technologies
> http://www.perldebugged.com/
> http://www.perlmedic.com/
>
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