Error 500: Premature end of script headers

Question

I get a "Premature end of script headers: contactform.cgi" error message when running the below script. What frustrates me is that I ran this as a .php on another server and it worked. However, I had to change servers and they only support CGI PHP. However, it doesn't work. I don't think the code is wrong, but take a look just in case.

I've read around and some have said it's a permissions issue. Could this be the case for me?

I know that the "display_errors" and "error_reporting" statements will display errors in the error log, but if I don't have access to the server, how can I check the logs?

#!/usr/local/bin/php

<?php

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
ini_set('display_errors',1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

if(isset($_POST['email'])) {

//Email this form to me
$email_to = "[e-mail]";

function died($error) {
    // your error code can go here
    echo "Oops... something's wrong. ";
    echo "Fix the error(s) below:<br /><br />";
    echo $error."<br /><br />";
    echo "All your base are belong to us...<br /><br />";
    die();
}


// validation expected data exists
if(!isset($_POST['first_name']) ||
    !isset($_POST['last_name']) ||
    !isset($_POST['email']) ||
    !isset($_POST['subject']) ||
    !isset($_POST['comments'])) {
    died('There appears to be a problem with the form you submitted.');       
}


$first_name = $_POST['first_name']; // required
$last_name = $_POST['last_name']; // required
$email_from = $_POST['email']; // required
$subject = $_POST['subject']; // not required
$comments = $_POST['comments']; // required

$error_message = "";
$email_exp = '/^[A-Za-z0-9._%-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,4}$/';
if(!preg_match($email_exp,$email_from)) {
$error_message .= 'The Email Address you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
$string_exp = "/^[A-Za-z .'-]+$/";
if(!preg_match($string_exp,$first_name)) {
$error_message .= 'The First Name you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
if(!preg_match($string_exp,$last_name)) {
$error_message .= 'The Last Name you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
if(strlen($comments) < 2) {
$error_message .= 'The Comments you entered do not appear to be valid.<br />';
}
if(strlen($error_message) > 0) {
died($error_message);
}


$email_message = "Form details below.\n\n";

function clean_string($string) {
  $bad = array("content-type","bcc:","to:","cc:","href");
  return str_replace($bad,"",$string);
}

$email_message .= "First Name: ".clean_string($first_name)."\n";
$email_message .= "Last Name: ".clean_string($last_name)."\n";
$email_message .= "Email: ".clean_string($email_from)."\n";
$email_message .= "Subject: ".clean_string($subject)."\n";
$email_message .= "Comments: ".clean_string($comments)."\n";

//Email Subject (put here to include subject from form)
$email_subject = "COR | ".clean_string($subject)."";


// create email headers
$headers = 'From: '.$email_from."\r\n".
'Reply-To: '.$email_from."\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
@mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, $headers);
?>

<!-- include your own success html here -->

<?php
header("Location: cor/thankyou.html");
}
?>

Answer 1

u forgot to add proper content-type header in the response which is a must have http header when hosting on apache2

use

print "Content-type:text/html\r\n\r\n"

or

header('Content-Type: text/html');

Answer 2

It is to do with file permissions and it happens on systems that have the suphp(usually cpanel/whost servers) installed.

Removing the write permission from anyone else but the owner(644|600) for the php files will fix the issue. That is how i got it fixed.

I hope this helps.