[MacPerl] Document Contains No Data (fwd)

[mark@cheers.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning/Muniz Eng.)]

According to Peter Apockotos:
> 
> http://www.imageattic.com/shop.html
> 
> On the site above we are trying to run a perl script (cgi) and it just
> keeps giving Document contains no data...any ideas?
> 

What this means is that this is not a MacPerl problem.
However, the answer is fairly simple.

"Document contains no data" message means that there was
no content given for the web browser to display.  This can
be caused by several problems:

1. Your program took too long to execute and thus could not
return the next HTML page to the server.

2. Your program has an error in it and thus nothing was
returned to the browser.

3. One of your files could not be accessed which caused a
problem in your program which made it not return anything
to the browser.

As you can see - the main theme here is: Nothing was
returned to the browser.

Ok, knowing this - how do you fix it?

Easy.  There are two ways to work on a problem like this:

1. Check the error log file (usually named error_log).
This will tell you (hopefully) what is the matter with your
program.  (ie: Couldn't access a file, error on some line
in your program, etc....)

2. Create a new file (if you are on a Unix system) which
contains commands.  Make the file executable.  Then run
it.  The commands are:

perl -c <filename>

Where <filename> is the name of your perl scripts.  Run
this and let Perl check the syntax of your program for
errors.  Very handy when writing Perl programs.  If you are
on a Mac (and thus using MacPerl), I believe you can do
this under MPW.  I do not believe you can do this via
AppleScript's in a MacPerl program since your program would
be knocked out of memory when it checks the first program.
Maybe a straight AppleScript program could do this?  At any
rate, it would be nice to be able to do a syntax check on
all of the perl programs in a given directory.

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