I have come up with a way to display the progress of the downloading of a file, but it requires resorting to shell script instead of Perl; a technique I often receive down votes for when I suggest it to others. I am assuming these down votes are deserved and therefore I am reaching out for advice on how to implement a "download progress display" in a cgi script without sorting to shell scripting. Here's the bit of code I use to get the initial size of the download. I couldn't figure out get this key piece of information via WWW::Mechanize or LWP. In this snippet I resort to "shelling out" to wget which will tell me the size of the ZIP file I want to download. I couldn't figure out how to do this in pure Perl. 
if ( $download_status eq "START" ) {
   my $wgetcmd = "wget -o $download_log -O $zipfile -b $zipurl";
   system ( $wgetcmd ) == 0 
      or die __FILE__ . " [" . __LINE__ . "] cannot execute $wgetcmd :
+$!\n";
   sleep 1;

   my $shell_out = <<`SHELL`;
grep Length $download_log | awk '{print \$3}'
SHELL
   $download_size = $shell_out;
}

[download]
Later on in the script I set a cookie to maintain the state of the download. If the download is not complete I simply "shell out" to grep awk and tail of the wget log file to get the status of the download. I hope there is a Monk that can help with my bad habits.

In reply to Help keep me from "shelling out" - download progress bar in cgi by Plankton

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