Plesk 11 Upgrade Unable to run Perl scripts in cgi-bin

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After an upgrade to Plesk 11, my Perl scripts located under cgi-bin/ for a specific domain were not executing properly. Requests generated HTTP response code 500 and my error logs showed the unhelpful message "Premature end of script headers" I verified all permissions and even disabled / re-enabled cgi-bin support through Plesk which installs a test script under cgi-bin/test/test.cgi Even the test script failed to run. It also generated the message "Premature end of script headers: test.cgi" I eventually resolved the issue with two changes:

The domain's root folder in /var/www/vhosts was not owned by the domain user. So I fixed that with a chown command.
Within the Plesk control panel, I had to disable "Perl" support and enable "CGI" support to get my perl scripts with the ".pl" extension to run under cgi-bin

Import GnuCash data into MoneyDance

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

GnuCash served me well while I was running Ubuntu as my primary desktop but since moving to a Mac Pro I've been disappointed in the performance and non-native nature of the GnuCash Mac port. I decided to migrate to MoneyDance and was quickly dismayed to discover GnuCash's poor support for standards based exporting.This GnuCash wiki-entry describes a few convoluted approaches to data export but the items it references are hopelessly outdated and generally do not function for the latest stable release - reason enough to ditch GnuCash.MoneyDance hadn't solved the problem on their end either but their wiki does reference a Perl script that converts the deprecated GnuCash Postgre storage format into a MoneyDance XML file. Since I knew that the development release of GnuCash supports a SQLite storage format I decided to see if I could update Sid Reed's aforementioned script for this new SQLite container.I'm no Perl Monger, but I do know regular expressions. My updated script worked well for me and seamlessly converted several years of GnuCash data. Please read the pre-requisites section in the header of this GnuCash to MoneyDance Migration Script before attempting to run it. In addition to the linked zip archive, this script is also available on github. Enjoy!

Perl on technocracy

Plesk 11 Upgrade Unable to run Perl scripts in cgi-bin

Import GnuCash data into MoneyDance