Perl Debugged

13.10. Command Line Testing

A CGI.pm program is easily tested from the command line; as soon as the program calls a CGI method or creates a CGI object it will prompt

(offline mode: enter name=value pairs on standard input)

and you can then type a series of lines like:

address="742 Evergreen Terrace"
phone=555-8707

End them with whatever character signals end-of-input to your current shell. The inputs you cannot provide this way are

• File uploads.

• Cookies: You can pass them by setting the environment variable HTTP_COOKIE to the name of the cookie followed by an = sign and the value of the cookie.

• User authentication: Set the REMOTE_USER environment variable to the name of the authenticated user. A Web server will not pass the password the user ...