nasa,

When your script is called via a "submit" button then your server will get a document request for your script using request method POST. This will look alike:

In this way when determining your web server access logs you would see all SUCCESSFULL calls to that script and in your error scripts then those calls to the script that caused an internal server error, which happens if your script dies or will bot be executed due to an error.

So I would go with Abigail-II to use the server logs for that counting task at its already there, you just need to grab those infos from them.

try to search for "web log anlalyzer" here at perlmonks or at cpan or sourceforge or even google and you'll find plenty of tools who already have been invented and mostly heavily tested, which enable you with small modifications or just custom initial settings to fullfill your task.

I would not recommend appending to a file as that consumes your web servers ressources and is already done in other places by the web server itself.

Have a nice day
All decision is left to your taste

Abigail

Alaso remember that your CGI script will be called many times, perhaps even (almost) simultaneously and that if you go for the "open data-file and add one to a value in this file", you are opening yourself to various race-conditions (such as: script instance A opens datafile and reads value; meanwhile instance B of the same script does likewise; instance A increments value and writes it back to the file; instance B does the same. Result: only 1 is added to the counter and not 2.)

And we are not even considering the bad things which can happen when your data-file gets opened simultaneously multiple times for reading and writing. This could confuse the best of Operating Systems!

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law