Fellow Monks,
I have a piece of code to authenticate users and let them download files from a server. The files are in a folder hidden from public and are only downloaded by users with correct permission (username/password).

To prevent passing a real URL, I read the file and dump it to STDOUT, here's the code that does that:

sub dl_file { 

    my $file = param('file');
    $file =~ s/^\.+//;
    $file =~ s/^\///;
    
    if (-e "$folder/$file") {
         my $data;
         open IN,  "$folder/$file" or die "Cannot open file $file, $!\
+n";
         binmode IN;
         {local $/; $data = <IN>;}
         close IN;
         my $filename = (reverse (split /\//, $file))[0];
         print header(-type=>"application/x-msdownload",
                  -attachment=>$filename,
                  -cookie=>[$cookie1, $cookie2]);
         print $data;
    }
    else {
        print $top, h1('Error'), p('file not found.');
        print hr, a({-href=>"$me?command=MAIN"}, 'Back to Main'), $bot
+tom;
    }

}

[download]

However, one problem arised when the admin of the site placed a 12 Mb file there.. so when trying to download, the script attempts to read the whole 12Mb in and pass them as a response, so just waiting for the script to start responding results in a browser timeout.

I had the idea of issuing an exec "cat ", "$folder/$file" but couldn't cause they are using the script on an NT server.

What's the best solution to this? would doing a while loop and reading a specified buffer size solve this? or should I look into another way of doing it?

He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

Chady | http://chady.net/

In reply to Reading a big file and passing to output by Chady

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