Problem

You need to find out where the Perl interpreter resides on your system.

Solution

Your hosting provider may have provided you with the location of the Perl interpreter in the introductory email or welcome message you received when you created your account. Most of the time, this will be something like /usr/bin/perl. If you're unsure, ask your hosting service or system administrator. And if you have shell access you can use the whereis command.

Discussion

The Movable Type software is written in the Perl programming language. In order for Perl to process any code, the first line of script must contain the location of the Perl interpreter. Depending on your system configuration, you may have to specify its location in order for any of the Movable Type scripts to run.

To determine the location of Perl on your web server, consult with your hosting service or system administrator. Alternately, if you have command line access, and are familiar with its use, you can log in to that account and type:

 $ whereis perl

This will give you the location(s) of Perl on your system. Typically the interpreter is found at /usr/bin/perl, the MT default location. If it isn't there, the following files must be modified:

• mt.cgi
• mt-add-notify.cgi
• mt-atom.cgi
• mt-check.cgi
• mt-comments.cgi
• mt-db2sql.cgi
• mt-search.cgi
• mt-send-entry.cgi
• mt-tb.cgi
• mt-xmlrpc.cgi
• mt-upgrade.cgi
• mt-view.cgi

Open each file in a text editor and change the first line from:

 #!/usr/bin/perl -w

to the location of the Perl interpreter in your system. For example:

 #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

Take care not to remove the -w at the end of the first line in each file. This setting turns on warnings in Perl and is necessary for Movable Type's operation.