"missing directive name in parsed document"

After an upgrade from Apache 1.3.* to 2.0.46, we're getting
the error "missing directive name in parsed document" logged on some
server-side include pages on our site.

Google's only hit for this string is into some source code, rather
than any kind of informative suggestions.

I don't yet see anything directly relevant at
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/upgrading.html
either.

Any clues, please, to help us home-in on the likely cause of this?
Does it for example mean that some directive which was supported in
1.3 has gone away in 2.0 ? (If so, is there a list of them?)

thanks

* Alan J. Flavell wrote:

>
> After an upgrade from Apache 1.3.* to 2.0.46, we're getting
> the error "missing directive name in parsed document" logged on some
> server-side include pages on our site.
>
> Google's only hit for this string is into some source code, rather
> than any kind of informative suggestions.
>
> I don't yet see anything directly relevant at
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/upgrading.html
> either.
>
> Any clues, please, to help us home-in on the likely cause of this?
> Does it for example mean that some directive which was supported in
> 1.3 has gone away in 2.0 ? (If so, is there a list of them?)

Most likely a bug. mod_include's filter implementation had some nasty ones
in the past. An upgrade to a more recent version should help.

nd
--
Winnetous Erbe: <http://pub.perlig.de/books.html#apache2>

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005, André Malo wrote:

> > After an upgrade from Apache 1.3.* to 2.0.46, we're getting
> > the error "missing directive name in parsed document" logged on some
> > server-side include pages on our site.
[...]

> Most likely a bug. mod_include's filter implementation had some nasty ones
> in the past. An upgrade to a more recent version should help.

OK, I take your point, but this isn't something I can change
unilaterally, it needs discussion with a number of manglement types,
our policy (not mine) is generally to take the version that comes with
our linux distro, and any other choice needs tedious discussion with
folks who are more interested in ticking boxes than actually
responding to technical issues... (sure, if it was just me, I'd
always install the latest Apache source, built per the Apache
guidelines).

However, I've taken another look at the offending include files, and
by chance I've now spotted the problem, so I'll put it on record here
in case it helps someone else.

There was one place where the following error had crept in:

<!--# echo ...

Note the superfluous space between "#" and "echo".

It appears that Apache 1.3 was silently fixing this up, whereas
Apache 2 was not.

Evidently this error had been copy/pasted to a number of other insert
files here too.

The correction was simple, once located, and no further errors of this
type are being logged now.

thanks