Hi, thank you schodckwm, here is my testing code. I used active perl 5.81 on windows xp. It seems that the I need use \\ to represent the '\' on windows to represent directory delimiter. The code works if I use $filename = "test.txt";. 
#!c:/perl/bin/perl -w
use CGI;

# only files in cgi-bin directory works?
#filename = "C:\\Program Files\\Apache Group\\Apache2\\htdocs\\project
+s\\Generate_Conc_xls\\test.txt";
$filename = "test.txt";

$header1 = "Content-disposition: attachment; filename=$filename\n";
$mime_type = "application/octet-stream";

#print header for downloading file to client
print $header1;
print "Content-Type: $mime_type\n\n";

#print content to client file
open (READ, "<$filename");
binmode READ;
local $/;
print <READ>;
close(READ);

[download]
Thanks a lot.

In reply to Re^2: Why I can not acess files outside cgi-bin directory? by perlfeng
in thread Why can I not acess files outside cgi-bin directory? by perlfeng

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