What are you file permissions on test.pl? Do you have execute permissions set? Not sure if this is very secure but gets you test working. [root@agagne cgi-bin]# ls -la total 32 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 19 14:36 . drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Jun 15 19:08 .. -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1767 Apr 23 12:09 java-rmi-1.5.0.06.cgi -rwxr--r-- 1 apache apache 171 Jun 19 14:36 test.pl