Problem with Apache Web Server

[Rick Rosinski]

I am running a stand-alone web server on my Slackware box.
I use it to set up my web site before uploading it to a virtual host.
The problem that I have is with the perl script that generates the table of
contents for the left frame of my web site (http://www.rickrosinski.com)
The copy on the virtual host works fine, but the same script generates an
internal server error, and the table of contents is not generated.  This was
not a problem on the SuSE system that I once had set up on the same box.
I had narrowed the problem down to this:  It seems that when any "open (FILE,
">>../data.files/contents.list") is encountered, it crashes with the Internal
Server Error.  I am running as root, all file permissions seem correct, and the
same scripts work fine on the virtual server.  Also, all scripts that don't
involve file access work fine on the local server.  I am using Apache 1.3.12.
Also, when I just run "perl /cgi-bin/contents.cgi", the correct HTML is
generated, including the table of contents from "../data.files/contents.list".

So, I think that there is a problem with Apache and file access.  Perl works
fine, and the virtual host works fine.  What could be wrong with Apache?

-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://www.rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com