Perl CGI scripts with SSI in Tomcat

Posted by carletto (carletto), 2 March 2006

I am trying to use SSI + CGI in Tomcat.
Installed SSI and CGI as written in the How-tos.
For CGI :
<servlet>
<servlet-name>cgi</servlet-name>
<servletclass>org.apache.catalina.servlets.CGIServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>debug</param-name>
<param-value>6</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>cgiPathPrefix</param-name>
<param-value>WEB-INF/cgi-bin</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>5</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>cgi</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/cgi/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Then I wrote a "index.shtml" file:
<html>




</html>
and a "ciao.cgi" file (in /webapps/ciao/ and in /webapps/ciao/WEB.INF/cgi/):
#!c:/Perl/bin/perl -wT
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "CIAO";

After writing in Explorer "http://localhost:80/ciao" I get:
Wednesday, 01-Mar-2006 17:46:50 CET #!c:/Perl/bin/perl -wT print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; print "CIAO";
[an error occurred while processing this directive] Wednesday, 01-Mar-2006 17:46:50 CET

and in the log :
Serving buffered resource '/index.shtml'
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: SSIProcessor.process -- processing command: echo
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: SSIProcessor.process -- processing command: exec
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: SSIServletExternalResolver.getServletContextAndPath( ciao.cgi, true)
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: SSIProcessor.process -- processing command: exec
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: SSIServletExternalResolver.getServletContextAndPath( cgi/ciao.cgi, true)
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]cgi: findCGI: path=/index.shtml, J:\jakarta-tomcat-5.0.30\webapps\ciao\WEB-INF/cgi-bin
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]cgi: findCGI: currentLoc=J:\jakarta-tomcat-5.0.30\webapps\ciao\WEB-INF\cgi-bin
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]cgi: findCGI: currentLoc=J:\jakarta-tomcat-5.0.30\webapps\ciao\WEB-INF\cgi-bin
2006-03-01 17:46:50 StandardContext[/ciao]ssi: #include--Couldn't include file: cgi/ciao.cgi
java.io.IOException: Couldn't find file: /cgi/ciao.cgi
at org.apache.catalina.ssi.SSIServletExternalResolver.getFileText(SSIServletExternalResolver.java:391)

Do you have an idea why it does not execute the script

? Where could I find a patch?
Thanks
Carlo

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 3 March 2006

Why are you trying to mix up SSIs and Perl code via CGIs? If you want to use SSIs ... and execs within them ... then the program you "exec" wouldn't be to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard. Now I don't thinks that's the cause of the problem that you've reported, but I do fear that if I halp you sort this one out I would be leading you down a blind alley.

Suggestion - use JUST an SSI, or JUST a Perl based CGI program and the setup should be much easier. If you have a substantial amount of HTML with just a little information you want to change in a Perl program, then write a Perl program that reads in a file of HTML and substitutes in it where appropriate.

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 3 March 2006

By the way - we have fully worked examples of using Tomcat to serve SSI pages here on our web site and to serve CGI written in Perl here on the site

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