in reply to setting a cookie on login

Oh, I see I forgot to answer your question:
My question is: how can I set it so that the user can stay logged in between pages (eg. use a cookie) without storing the password somewhere in plaintext to check $passhash against? Sorry if I've gone about this whole thing completely the wrong way.
You don't need to store the password in the plain: 
if ($passhash eq crypt($incoming_password,$passhash)) {
  # $incoming_password is correct
}

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You only need to store the encrypted passwords. I must be going blind, you're already doing this.
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