What does this error mean when I'm setting up AWstats?

June 7, 2004 6:22 PM

Anyone have any experience with setting up the Web stats program AW stats? My website uses it, and it seems pretty good, except that when I ask for specific categories I get this error message: sh: /home/cgi-bin/awstats.pl: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: Permission denied
posted by inksyndicate to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Where is the perl executable on your server? Is it, actually, at /usr/bin/perl or somewhere else?
posted by majick at 6:54 PM on June 7, 2004

It's truly at /usr/bin/perl...that's what confuses me.
posted by inksyndicate at 7:34 PM on June 7, 2004

The sh: part seems suspicious to me, as though something is trying to spawn a child process through the shell and failing.

Have you checked the executable permissions of the scripts in your cgi-bin directory?
posted by majick at 8:03 PM on June 7, 2004

That sounds like a good avenue. thanks.
posted by inksyndicate at 11:04 PM on June 7, 2004

The error message is coming from /bin/sh. Are you sure that /usr/bin/perl is executable by you?

P.S. to show the error message comes from the shell create a shell script like:

[ryan@luna bash]$ cat > test.sh <<!
> #! /tmp/noexecutepermission
> !
[ryan@luna bash]$ cat test.sh
#! /tmp/noexecutepermission
[ryan@luna bash]$ chmod a+x test.sh
[ryan@luna bash]$ touch /tmp/noexecutepermission
[ryan@luna bash]$ test.sh
bash: ./test.sh: /tmp/noexecutepermission: bad interpreter: Permission denied
[ryan@luna bash]$ 

Also a strings on the perl executable doesn't turn up the "Permission denied" string but it does on /bin/bash. So that's where the error message is coming from. Why it's happening on your system I can't say.
posted by rdr at 11:30 PM on June 7, 2004

Say, how does awstats compare to webalizer?
posted by pissfactory at 4:45 AM on June 8, 2004

Not sure which I prefer, I'm using the old "Analog" stats that come with Dreamhost. AW stats seems to have a lot of useful info.

It works now, by the way.
posted by inksyndicate at 7:29 AM on June 8, 2004