print $query->header(-cookie=>$cookie);
[download]

Not having used CGI::Cookie before I don't think I can comment much on it. I can mention that some of your problems may be in the use of "H" instead of "h" in your expiry date. I know that this caused me some problems presumably because the browser expired my cookie very quickly...

The following functions:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use CGI;
use CGI::Cookie;
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;

my $cgi = new CGI;
setcookie("fish", "fosh");
getcookie();

sub setcookie
{
        my ($DBuser, $DBpasswd) = @_;
        my $cookie1 = new CGI::Cookie(-name=>'DB',
                                      -value=>{ username => $DBuser,
                                                password => $DBpasswd,
                                              },
                                      -expires =>  '+1h');
        print $cgi->header(-cookie=>[$cookie1]);
}

sub getcookie
{
        my %cookies1 = fetch CGI::Cookie;
        return unless %cookies1;

        my $db = $cookies1{'DB'};

        return unless $db;

        my %dbvs = $db->value if $db;
        print Dumper(%dbvs);
        print Dumper(%cookies1);
}
[download]

Hope it helps.

jarich

Update: Had a revelation about H vs h and finally made the functions work consistently.
Update2: It occurs to me that you may feel that printing the cookie to the screen is a security risk because passwords may be involved. Whilst this is true I hope you realise that any passwords you store in the cookie will be visible to the owner of the cookie (if they want to see them) as well as to anyone who can see the environment variables of the browser process. What is more the cookie will be passed to all other websites in your domain. So, for example, if I pass out a cookie to the www.unimelb.edu.au domain, then it's not just my cgi scripts that can access that cookie, but every website over the whole campus. (Extrapolate for something like geocities...) As a general rule, storing passwords in a cookie is a really bad idea. Storing anything that you don't want the user to be able to read and record is just asking for trouble.

from the CGI docs
print $query->header(-cookie=>$cookie);

This will not prevent it from printing to the screen when run as a command line program - since CGI uses STDOUT for it's content. You could disable from the command line by checking the $query->request_method() a command line invocation should IIRC not return anything

Thanks... That hides the header... which is good! However, I still cannot get the ReadCookie() method to read the cookie... or more correctly, I cannot get the cookie set properly.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use CGI qw/:standard/;
use CGI::Cookie;

$passwd="toronto5";

$cookie1 = new CGI::Cookie(-name=>'DB',
    -value=>{ username => simony,
          password => toronto5,
    },
    -expires =>  '+8H');
    
#print header(-cookie=>[$cookie1]);

print "Set-Cookie: $cookie1\n";
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print $cookie1;
[download]

The above has no problem setting the cookie if it stands alone. I don't want to be a code mooch, but finding documentation that is correct is not easy--even the man pages are not consistant. Can you provide any direction in this manner?

Thanks, Simon