I would have to agree with tachyon, this might not be the best way of doing things... If you are going to the trouble of using cookies why not use multiple params in the URL? Are you using any kind of database?

Ideally, I would think you would want to set something up like this:
1. User tries to log in
2. You validate the user (we are going to assume this is a valid user)
3. You then write a cookie with some MD5 value. You also write this MD5 value along with a userId (this could become a session Id or whatever) to the database (We use MySQL for this)
4. Now you have a semi-secure way to use 1 script and just get the MD5 string from the cookie and look up the user information that you need.

*Note you could also change the MD5 string and reset the cookie on every page hit the user does for more security. But you need to be careful if you have pop up's that need to also validate the user and there could be an issue with the user hitting refresh in the middle of a request.

*Update -- You could also look into CGI::Session

This is my first time posting on PM, but I have been lurking around ever since a co-worker informed me about the site. Make sure you take the others responses as constructive criticism and not an attack on how you are doing things. One thing I have noticed is that this is a very smart and savvy community and if you can deal with some constructive criticism you will usually end up with the correct way to do things.

Let me know if any of this does not make sense (again this is my first post), and any of you more experienced guys feel free to rip my suggestion apart :)
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StrebenMönch (I stole this sig idea, just wanted to see what it looks like)

In reply to Re^3: Ideas on how to redirect users to a specific index by StrebenMönch
in thread Ideas on how to redirect users to a specific index by Anonymous Monk

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