Yes, when working on code in spurts it's always harder to get back into it. My job is half perl, half general system administration, and not split in even halves. :) It's both all day, interrupting programming time with floor calls and hardware problems all day long. It can make remembering where you were a chore...

Just a side note....You realize of course that just putting a username in a cookie is not at all secure. Anyone can fake a cookie with ease. So it's probably fine for a protected intranet app with trusted users, but if you're trying to keep unauthorized folks out of a public website, that's not going to do it. Your best bet if you need more options than .htaccess files is to look into the Apache::AuthCookie module. I use a subclass of it called Apache::AuthCookieDBI, and though it wasn't all that easy to get going, I love it now.

cheers!

Funny that I was just reading the Apache docs about this earlier today. If you're using Apache, and have the ability to set per-directory .htaccess (which I assume you do), look at: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/auth.html#basicworks You can configure your various secured directories such that they are named under one authentication name, or "realm", to which browsers will send the same auth info on every request. This prevents the constant auth logins when changing directories.

Try adding the line:
AuthName "Our Protected Stuff"
to your .htaccess file and see what happens. I've not tried this, but will soon have a need for it. Let me know how well it works.

-Shawn
(P^h) Phaysis
If idle hands are the tools of the devil, are idol tools the hands of god?