Linux – Internal Server Error (Timeou waiting for output from CGI)

1. The CGI script will run with the userid of the webserver, which might not be the userid of the person who was testing it. Have you considered that?

2. The CGI script needs to print a header and some output like "Success, thanks for using auto.sh".

 echo "Content-type: text/plain"
 echo 
 echo "Success, thanks for using auto.sh"

If its too clunky trying to do CGI from the shell, wrap it in a little bit of perl or python which have libraries to deal with CGI.

An alternative approach would be to leave a token in a file or database column that tells it to run, and then have it either activate from cron or have it constantly run and look for the token.

Also, depending on how the web server is set up, your CGI only gets so long to run before it times out...

That's not the way to solve the problem - HTTP is not intended to handle operations taking a very long time - while it sounds like your current PHP config is allowing the program to run for a long time this implies that you've misconfigured it - it should know when the webserver drops the conenction and respond appropriately. It might be possible to fudge the webserver config, and even to get a browser to stay connected for long enough, and maybe you don't have to worry about proxies in between - but you're using each of the tools in a way they were not designed to be used.

The right way to solve the problem is to start it from a web page, but running is a seperate process group and add in code to the long running process to write the status somewhere which can then be polled by a script triggered from the browser.