Poison difficulty

I can’t get anything to work properly on this box the way I see it in writeups. I’ve tried replicating the steps in this writeup HTB: Poison | 0xdf hacks stuff to attempt log poisoning but my poisoned web request gives me the error: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘rm’ (T_STRING) in /var/log/httpd-access.log on line 15

Additionally, trying to base64 decode the encoded password gives me an error: base64: invalid input