4J

For many Perl CGI developers it's always a pain to debug CGI scripts from the command line. Here is a quick way to help you:

$ export HTTP_COOKIE="user_id=abc123"
$ export QUERY_STRING="month=jan&year=2001"
$ export REQUEST_METHOD="GET"
$ ./your-script.cgi

That's it. At least for GET requests. For POST data you need to do the following: Put all your POST data in a file:

recipient=John@Doe.com&Fullname=M+Name

...and then set your environment like this:

$ export HTTP_COOKIE="user_id=abc123"
$ export QUERY_STRING=""
$ export REQUEST_METHOD="POST"

...and then run your script:

$ ./scriptname.pl < postdata.txt

Here are some additional links that you might find useful:

• http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/servererror.shtml
• http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/linux/cgi/ch15_03.htm

Have fun hacking...