Greetings!

I am having some problems with IE and how it is handling the Content-Disposition header (I am not the first as it would seem).

When clicking a link in a web page with a CGI that returns the Content-Disposition header, IE will display a dialogue box "Save Open Cancel". Save works fine (saving the file and then opening works). Open, however will open the helper application but the file is always not found.

I have done some searching on the Net about this and found a few posted topics but no answers. Any ideas? Workarounds?

Here is a stripped down sample HTML page and CGI so you can reproduce the error and see for yourself.

test.html: 

<a href="test.cgi">Download</a>

[download]

test.cgi: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
print "Content-type: application/octet-stream\n";
print "Content-disposition: attachment; filename=big-test.csv\n\n";
print "Test,One,Two,Three\n";
exit;

[download]

Note: For this error to be produced as I am explaining it, you need both the HTML and CGI file. Opening the CGI directly in IE produces different results. Also, the Content-type header can be omitted and produces the same results. I won't bother mentioning that this works fine in Firefox... oh, oops ;)

As always, thank you in advance for any enlightenment!

In reply to Content-Disposition... odd behavior in IE by Rodster001

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