Yes i have abandoned symlink idea- I am doing what ikegami suggested. The octet stream thingie.It works marvelous.

Here's the chunk of code..

  # the SV hash is non-tainted data, that means at this point the data is     
  # coming from the server, not the client 
  # $SV{file_selected_path} is the path to the file in the document     
  # directory, here there are multiple directories etc
  # here we make ugly/azz/filename.pdf to filename.pdf
  my $filename = $SV{file_selected_path};$filename=~s/^.+\///;

# $DOC has the absolute path on server to the documents directory
my $FILE;
if (!open($FILE, '<',"$DOC/$SV{file_selected_path}")) {
   print "Location: $WWW/?sorry\n\n"; 
	exit;
}

# the next code line makes it so if you go to download.cgi,
# the user gets prompted to do what with filename.pdf, cute.
print(qq|Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="$filename"\n
Content-Type: application/octect-stream\n\n|);

binmode(STDOUT);
binmode($FILE);
$/ = \1024; # Read in blocks of 1024 bytes;
print while <$FILE>;

exit;

In reply to Re^2: at job help ? by leocharre
in thread at job help ? by leocharre

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.