Thanks for jumping in! I am using CGI to take a bunch of values from a page and a file upload. The reason I am jumping through these hoops is to determine the MIME type and discovered that CGI's MIME checking just reads the extension and can easily be fooled (as well as all other perl mods) but by using linux's mime checking I get better results if I could only apply it against the actual file being uploaded. (Sorry about being so wordy on this)