...bear in mind that when your CGI script runs, the world looks different to your script than when you run it by hand under your own account.

Code that executes as CGI will typically only know a part of the host filesystems, not the entire set of all directories and files. In addition, it will be executed as if were the user nobody in most cases. (Or at least as a user with minimal privilege on the server.)

So you may have to provide the full path to htpasswd when your script is run.

With luck, all you have to do is change this line:

$cmd = "htpasswd -b myusers user3 pass";
[download]

to something like this:

$cmd = "/opt/httpd/bin/htpasswd -b myusers user3 pass";
[download]

where you supply the accurate pathname to your htpasswd binary.

Hope that helps.

...All the world looks like -well- all the world, when your hammer is Perl.
---v