--- title: Other Things Can Bite teaser: | Environment variables don't take effect for Apache on Windows unless you restart the computer. tags: apache author: Chad Pytel published_on: 2006-01-30 --- I was having a lot of problems with getting ps2pdf working from a CGI Perl program running under Apache on Windows at a client's site. If you've been [paying attention] you might ask "Why are you running Apache on Windows and Perl?". That'd be a good question. The answer is because this stuff was written before we made that switch, and also necessity and compromise… definitely a topic for a future post. [paying attention]: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222024751/http://www.thoughtbot.com/news/2005/11/rubyonrails Anyway, ps2pdf would work from the commandline, but from the Perl script the batch file that ps2pdf calls (ps2pdfxx) was not being found. Despite my Google kung-fu, it took me a while to find [what looked like the solution][solution]. [solution]: https://web.archive.org/web/20061231004004/http://www.talkaboutcomputing.com/group/comp.text.pdf/messages/76870.html Excited, I did what it said, but it still didn't work! After trying everything else I could think of, I tried the old trick for Windows – rebooting… Turns out, environment variables don't take effect for Apache on Windows unless you restart the computer, even restarting the Apache service doesn't work. I figure I better post it here for posterity, although hopefully you're not actively deploying code running under Apache on Windows.