My advice is to let it go for now, and just accept CGI.pm's way of doing it. A few years ago, after Perl5 came out, and CGI.pm, there was many posts here concerning the old manual-cgi-parsing, and the general wisdom is always use CGI.pm instead of the old Perl4 style manual input parsing. The question was asked so many times, that when anyone asked a cgi question that used manual parsing, they were answered simply with " use CGI.pm".

So let it go. There are many tiny details, see manual parsing for an idea of the complexities. So just accept for now, as a definition, "always use CGI.pm". The common complaint about CGI.pm is that it is big and cumbersome, but you can just import the input parsing portion of it.... use CGI qw(:cgi), or check out CPAN for CGI::Simple and CGI::Lite.

You will run into so many problems with manual parsing that it is a waste of time to learn it. For instance what happens when you have multiple files to upload, or you want to give a different name to the uploaded file on the receive end? Look at this nice example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use CGI::Simple;

my $upload_dir='uploads';
my $q = new CGI::Simple;
print $q->header();

my $files    = $q->upload();                # number of files uploaded
+;
my @files    = $q->upload();               # names of all uploaded fil
+es
my $filename = $q->param('upload_file');    # filename of uploaded fil
+e
my $mime     = $q->upload_info($filename,'mime'); # MIME type of uploa
+ded file
my $size     = $q->upload_info($filename,'size'); # size of uploaded f
+ile

# short and sweet upload
my $ok = $q->upload( $q->param('upload_file'),"$upload_dir/$filename")
+;
print "Uploaded ".$q->param('upload_file')." and wrote it OK!\n" if $o
+k;

print "total files = $files<br>
       filenames = @files<br>
       filename = $filename<br>
       mimetype= $mime<br>
       size=$size<br>";
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