Tie a filehandle. Stick the text of an HTTP POST with an uploaded file in there. Pass the filehandle to CGI->new(). Process the upload as you normally would. Check to see that you've received the file as usual.

Thanks chromatic, Your suggestion got me poking around to create such a file. Here's some starter code for someone else wanting to do this:

use HTTP::Request::Common;
use LWP::UserAgent;

# This form data will be printed to STDOUT
my $r = POST 'http://www.perl.org/survey.cgi',
       Content_Type => 'form-data',
       Content      => [ name  => 'Gisle Aas',
                         email => 'gisle@aas.no',
                         gender => 'M',
                         born   => '1964',
                         init   => ["$ENV{HOME}/.profile"],
                       ];
print $r->as_string;
[download]

-mark

While this approach made sense to me, it didn't turn out to work as expected. It looks like the CGI.pm "new" function is expecting a basic name/value format from the file handle, and can't currently handle a raw HTTP POST request.

Another approach that occured to me is to capture the environment variables of a real HTTP POST, and then set them again inside the test script.

-mark

Next, I actually sent the request to a Perl script, and then dumped out %ENV to capture that. This gives me the correct content length, and other needed environment variables

Finally, I created the test script, which is fooled into thinking that is is normal file upload, because all the environmental variables are set, and the data is coming in on STDIN. I tried tying the filehandle directly instead of duplicating it with STDIN, but that didn't work.

So with my working input file, here's a snippet from the test script:

%ENV = (
    %ENV, 
          'SCRIPT_NAME' => '/test.cgi',
          'SERVER_NAME' => 'perl.org',
          'HTTP_CONNECTION' => 'TE, close',
          'REQUEST_METHOD' => 'POST',
          'SCRIPT_URI' => 'http://www.perl.org/test.cgi',
          'CONTENT_LENGTH' => '2986',
          'SCRIPT_FILENAME' => '/home/usr/test.cgi',
          'SERVER_SOFTWARE' => 'Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) ',
          'HTTP_TE' => 'deflate,gzip;q=0.3',
          'QUERY_STRING' => '',
          'REMOTE_PORT' => '1855',
          'HTTP_USER_AGENT' => 'libwww-perl/5.69',
          'SERVER_PORT' => '80',
          'REMOTE_ADDR' => '127.0.0.1',
          'CONTENT_TYPE' => 'multipart/form-data; boundary=xYzZY',
          'SERVER_PROTOCOL' => 'HTTP/1.1',
          'PATH' => '/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin',
          'REQUEST_URI' => '/test.cgi',
          'GATEWAY_INTERFACE' => 'CGI/1.1',
          'SCRIPT_URL' => '/test.cgi',
          'SERVER_ADDR' => '127.0.0.1',
          'DOCUMENT_ROOT' => '/home/develop',
          'HTTP_HOST' => 'www.perl.org'
);

use CGI;
open(IN,'<t/post_text.txt');
*STDIN = *IN;
$q = new CGI;
[download]

-mark