See This Node for information about doing what you are trying to do.

But, be warned that the referrer information is information that comes from the client, so it is not secure at all and should not be trusted with anything important.

Perfect solution. Thanks for the pointer.

The recent Q&A How do i force the user to download my content? addresses your issue.

Note that referrer is easily spoofed. If content protection matters that much, you may want to look at session id's and encrypted connections.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Greetings Snaps_Provolone,

I read somewhere, I think maybe in the GD::Graph or Spreadsheet::WriteExcel documentation, that it can be done by controlling the CGI header. The examples given in this documentation are similar to:

print "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel\n";
print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=yourfile.xls\n";
print "\n";
[download]

Of course, if you're doing anything with CGI, you should definately use the CGI.pm module. In this case, you might try:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;

my $query = new CGI;
print $query->header(
  -type => 'application/vnd.ms-excel',
  -content_disposition => 'attachment; filename=yourfile.xls'
);

binmode STDOUT;
[download]

Oh, and that reminds me: that last line is important. Switch to binmode before you print your binary data to the browser.

BTW, what sort of binary data are you trying to send to the user's browser?

-gryphon
code('Perl') || die;

UPDATE: After re-reading your post, I realize now that I'm not exactly answering your question. Sorry. However, let me point out that if you have your script load and print the binary file to the browser rather than redirecting the user, you can more easily control the user experience. A redirect will show the user where you are housing the file(s) s/he wants. I don't know if this is a concern or not, but anyway...

To make my posting a bit clearer, yes I do want to hide the files true source from the client. The files are ZIP files. Basically it's trying to keep people from linking directly my files. I don't think that I need the extra security of session ID's, just a simple referrer check would probably suffice to keep my files from being linked all over the web. If you want to see what I am doing currently - peek at http://www.clan-originalsin.com/files/cgi-bin/files/os-files.pl?ViewStart=0&ViewCat=4&B1=View