[MacPerl-WebCGI] Solution to "trashed %ENV" puzzle

[Ronald Thisted <thisted@health.bsd.uchicago.edu>]

A week or two ago I sought advice on a problem I was having.  When my 
cgi script was passed information from a POST-ed form, the %ENV 
associative array (which is supposed to contain keyword/value pairs) 
was corrupted.  In particular, some keywords became values, some 
values were associated with the wrong keyword, etc.  This occurred 
even when I used standard .cgi MacPerl scripts (such as those 
supplied on commercial MacPerl cd's) that simply echo the contents of 
%ENV.  Even things like the demo.cgi script in the MacPerl 5 
distribution failed to work properly.

This behavior did not occur on another Mac, and was neither 
MacPerl-version specific nor web-server specific.  Several people 
made suggestions which turned out not to be related to the problem -- 
but I thank you all for your suggestions.

In the end, Chris Nandor provided the critical clue.  He suggested 
that I should "delete the bad environment variable in your 
preferences.  :-)  Do that and all will be well (probably)." 
Actually, checking the preferences (via the Edit menu) revealed no 
funky-looking preferences, just USER and TEMPDIR.  I deleted those 
anyway, and the problem remained.  Finally, I threw away the entire 
"MacPerl 5 Preferences" file and restarted.  From that point on, 
everything has worked just fine.

Thanks again for the encouragement and help.  I hope that my 
discovery will save someone else a problem later.


Ronald Thisted, PhD            Department of Health Studies
Professor and Chairman         The University of Chicago
(773) 834-1242                 5841 S Maryland Ave (MC 2007)
thisted@galton.uchicago.edu    Chicago, IL 60637

==== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
==== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-webcgi-request@macperl.org