It might be helpful if you didn't depend on the external program date to get the dateparts. Perl is perfectly capable of handling those dateparts itself, either on its own, or via simple, standard modules, or via more elaborate CPAN modules (and that's just one example). The latter can be used for relative date calculations; on the latter you can get by calculating the times in seconds, but watch out for summer time, and thus days that are not 24 hours long. Calculating days relative to noon, on any day, is safe.

To pass around the values, you need form variables (thus a HTML form, or equivalent), and form values processing on the server side, either via GET or POST; CGI.pm, which you are already using, will do fine.

For the form values, you can use any button to set a hidden input using Javascript before submitting the form; or you can use ordinary links, where you convert the parameter values straight to an URL. (Ordinary <input name="d" value="x" type="submit"> isn't usable because of the mixup in HTML between the value in the form and the text on the button.)

I could elaborate and give examples on all approaches, but just one solution is enough so you'd better let us know which approach you're thinking on taking.

I am not particularly interested in the dates so I just used what I was most familiar with...

The form method would be fine is guess but i have no knowledge of javascript. But I guess any simple solution will do

I think i get the point of using internal modules so that we can get absolute offset... but I guess I was thinking more in terms of relative offset... like whats in table +1 or whats in table -1...

If you want to change the title “and such” using buttons, then it is extremely probable that you will need to use JavaScript to do that.

You see, the only time that the server (i.e. Perl) would become involved, is when there is a “round-trip” involved:   the client makes an HTTP GET or POST to the server, and server replies with an HTTP response.

Most likely, everything that you want to happen ... happens entirely on the client side, start to finish.   As the most-simple example, the button could contain a onclick= handler which runs a bit of JavaScript code that changes, say, the window.title (in the browser’s own DOM model).   When the JavaScript code does that, the browser obediently repaints the screen.   The server, meanwhile, has nothing to do with it.

i just had an idea but not sure if it is practical...

but can i call a cgi script recursively from itself??? is it possible to do that???

Ok guys i think i have found one solution to my problem :D

i called my own scribt back again. i have done it for only i button but it seems to be working :D

the link http://www.cgi101.com/learn/ given by toolic helped me, thanks.

so any other solutions apart from this one??

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use CGI qw(:all) ;

my $today;
my $thismonth;
my $thisyear;


chomp($today = `date +"%-d"`);
chomp($thismonth = `date +"%-m"`);
chomp($thisyear = `date +"%Y"`);
my $cal;
my $dir;

$cgi = CGI->new;
$dir=$cgi->param("dir");
if($cgi->param("today") && $cgi->param("thismonth") && $cgi->param("th
+isyear"))
{
            if($dir eq "back")
            {
                $today=$cgi->param("today");
                $today=$today-1;
            }    
}

print $cgi->header,$cgi->start_html("$today.$thismonth.$thisyear");
    
print<<HTML;
<table border=1>
<tr>
    <td><form name="input" action="date.cgi" method="POST">
        <input type="hidden" name="today" value="$today">
        <input type="hidden" name="thismonth" value="$thismonth">
        <input type="hidden" name="thisyear" value="$thisyear">
        <input type="hidden" name="dir" value="back">
        <input type="submit" value="Yesterday"></td>
        </form>
    <td>$today</td>
    <td>$thismonth</td>
    <td>$thisyear</td>
    <td><button type="button">Tomorrow</td>
    <td><button type="button">Set Title</td>
</tr>
</table>
HTML
print $cgi->end_html;
[download]

Some so/so examples in http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI-Ajax/MANIFEST, CGI::AJAX inside CGI::AJAX and http://www.linux-magazine.com/Magazine/Downloads/62/Perl/, http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2006/62/Perl-AJAX, http://www.cgi-app.org/index.cgi?AjaxInfo and http://learn.jquery.com/

I say "so so" because they won't teach you how the internet works, how tcp/ip, sockets, websites, html, ajax, all fit together, but they are a start, they are short examples of one way to do it

Have been trying to learn cgi and perl

ya i am a newbie but not a complete one.... have gone through some documents but couldn't find how to do this bit...

What i mean to say is all the examples i have seen so far collect the info from a form and print the details at the bottom of the page or in a file. I haven't seen a any example that that itself and that's what i want to do here...

Using Mojolicious::Lite and its templating system

Here is how you can test this from cli for today

Here is how you can test this from cli for tomorrow