perl Makefile.PL make make install
This will copy CGI.pm to your perl library directory for use by all perl scripts. You probably must be root to do this. Now you can load the CGI routines in your Perl scripts with the line:
use CGI;
If you don't have sufficient privileges to install CGI.pm in the Perl library directory, you can put CGI.pm into some convenient spot, such as your home directory, or in cgi-bin itself and prefix all Perl scripts that call it with something along the lines of the following preamble:
use lib '/home/davis/lib'; use CGI;
If you are using a version of perl earlier than 5.002 (such as NT perl), use this instead:
BEGIN {
unshift(@INC,'/home/davis/lib');
}
use CGI;
The
CGI distribution also comes with a cute module called Carp. It redefines the die, warn, confess and croak error routines so that they write nicely formatted error messages into the server's error log (or to the output stream of your choice). This avoids long hours of groping through the error and access logs, trying to figure out which
CGI script is generating error messages. If you choose, you can even have fatal error messages echoed to the browser to avoid the annoying and uninformative ``Server Error'' message.