perl-less, what you are asking us to do is to provide you, free of charge, with code that you are going to get paid for. The monastery is here to help people with Perl, not to do people's work for them. This is worse than students asking us to do their homework for them, you're actually being paid to do something which you claim you have no knowledge of how to do. How much more dis-honest can you get?

Does your "client" know that you don't know Perl? Have you never taken an ethics course before? There are plenty of people here in the monastery who are actually paid for developing Perl applications and/or consulting in situations like the one you describe, although I am not one of them.

If you want help with this, I suggest that you 1) offer a fee to be paid for the service, since you are getting paid for the project, and 2) specify very clearly what your requirements are. What O/S is this server on? What version(s) of Perl are available on it? Do you have full freedom on this machine or is it leased and subject to restrictions by the ISP? And then, what exactly do you wish to do?

I hope you find someone to help you and I hope you pay them well for their service. I, however, will not help you to create something which you are going to claim authorship of and collect compensation for.

- - arden.

update: I was referring to being dis-honest with his client, long before it was stated that "she is a friend." I'm also somewhat upset by the lack of effort shown by the poster: what has he tried, what kind of errors was he given? I know that many (maybe most?) of the folks here get paid one way or another for their development work. I do not expect the site to be used only by people for non-commercial endeavours, but I do expect some effort to be expended first by those asking for aide and I try to promote honesty in business (and education) by not claiming ownership of something you cannot or did not create.