jozefn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Here is the situation: I am on an network of windose boxes with apache running on one of the boxes. I have my web apps there with perl/mysql etc.. I want to build a script that will be run in the users login script that will take the username via $ENV{USERNAME} and build a cookie do a request to the server so that the cookie will be built on the users box containing the user's USERNAME, so that I can use cgi->cookie and know who is there. What I have attempted so far. I have a cookie built on the opening page of my intranet site. The cookie contains a bogus value. In the login script I had a script that runs out and finds the cookie file no matter where it is on the user's disk, slurps it and writes it back out with the $ENV{USERNAME}. I use all the same delimiters for records etc and the file looks exactly the same (or so I think) as the orginal cookie file. However the browser spots the differenct fast - won't access the cookie and then trashes even when I set expire to 01/01/2045. Any and all observations appreciated.

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Re: Unusal request about cookies
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 26, 2002 at 20:07 UTC

    You don't mention which browser your using but most browsers I'm aware of not only keep the cookie file, but also an index file to the cookies. Have you tried recording teh timestamps on the file before you open it and doing a touch (or equivalent) to set it (them) back to their original values after you edited the file. Maybe the browser is checking dates.

    Of course, it could also be doing a checksum of the contents, in which case your probably snookered.

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[d/l]
      Thanks for the info. These are things that I did not think about. BTW - only IE.
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      I just did some experimentation. It does not appear to be the date-time stamp on the file. I just copied the cookie file and trashed the original cookie file and the browser could see my cookie just fine. It must be as you suggest some relation between index.dat and the cookie file. Still looking.
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