Does 'use lib' work for UNC paths?

Question

My hosted scripts have been moved and no longer work.

The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers.

I notice that someone at my host company has modified my scripts so that where I used to have

use lib 'd:/myorig/LIB';

I now have

use lib '//newhost/LIB';

Should this work?

I tried 1800 INFORMATION's suggestion and ran the minimal script of

#!perl -w
use lib '//whatever/lib';
print "success";

...which gave the same result.

Update: ysth's suggestion of FatalsToBrowser did indeed reveal more information. It looks like the path (added by someone from the hosting company) might be wrong.

Update2: The hosting company now says that these scripts, unchanged from the previous host mind, are throwing lots of syntax errors. "Since we cannot debug your scripts for you we suggest you contact the original programmer and ask them for help". <grinds teeth>

Partial Resolution: The hosting company finally realised they hadn't set permissions correctly. They still aren't right, and (aargh) they don't allow site owners to set folder permissionsn, not even on folders within their own sites.

Answer 1

I don't know if it should work or not, but my intuition is that it would be okay. However, the two use lib lines you posted are not equivalent.

# go to the 'd' drive and use the 'myorigLIB' directory on that drive
use lib 'd:/myorigLIB';

# go to the 'newhostLIB' server - no path is specified - this looks invalid to me
use lib '//newhostLIB';

Perhaps you need to specify the path to the share on the server? Also, you might need to look at permissions? Maybe the user the CGI is running as cannot access that network path?

Also, you could write a simple (non CGI) program to test your theory and just run it:

#!perl -w
use lib '//whatever/lib';
print "success";

Then just run that on the server if you can and see what happens.