You've got mangled code, that's why. You're opening the file to the FILE handle, then binmoding and reading from MY_FILE, which, in this script, does not exist. As for sending an 'anonymous' file, follow the advice given by another monk below and just move the files out of the web server's document root.

use CGI;

my $q = CGI->new();

my $buf_size = 4096;
my $file_root = '/home/goldcal/files'; # not in /www!

open( my $fh, '<', "$file_root/wlmlm401.exe" )
    or die("open failed: $!");
binmode($fh);

print $q->header(
    -type    => 'application/exe',
    -expires => '-1d'
);

binmode(STDOUT);

my $buf;
while ( read($fh, $buf, $buf_size) ) { print $buf; }
[download]

Hi,

In the CGI module (the 'CREATING A STANDARD HTTP HEADER' section) there is mention of the -attachment parameter:

The -attachment parameter can be used to turn the page into an attachment. Instead of displaying the page, some browsers will prompt the user to save it to disk. The value of the argument is the suggested name for the saved file. In order for this to work, you may have to set the -type to "application/octet-stream".

I hope this helps.

my $boundary_string = "\n" . "--End" . "\n";
my $end_of_data = "\n" . "--End--" . "\n";

my @file_list = ("wlmlm401.exe");

print <<EOH;
Content-type: multipart/x-mixed\;boundary=End

EOH

foreach my $file ( @file_list ) {
&send_file( $file );
print $boundary_string;
}
print $end_of_data;
exit(0);

sub send_file {
my $file = $_[0];
if ( open (FILE, "< $file")) {

print <<EOF;
Content-type: application/octet-stream
Content-disposition: attachment\; filename=$file

EOF

binmode FILE;
print <FILE>;
close (FILE);

} else {
print "Cannot open file $file!"}
}
[download]

So I tried merlyn's suggestion:

$/ = undef;

@ARGV = ("/home/goldcal/www/files/wlmlm401.exe");
print multipart_init();
while(<>) {
  print multipart_start("application/octet-stream");
  print $_;
  print multipart_end();
}
print multiplart_final();

## UPDATE - THis part should not have been here, it is finger trouble 
+;)
#print $cgi->header( -type => "application/octet-stream",
#                   -expires => "-1d",
#                   -attachment => "wlmlm401.exe",
#                   );
[download]

I am using Firefox 1.0 as my browser, but I did try it in IE and it works equally unwell.

jdotoronto

Um, in your first attempt, it looks like you forgot to do "binmode STDOUT"?

And in the code you showed for trying merlyn's suggestion, it looks like you're printing the content header after printing the file (and you're not even doing "binmode" on the input, let alone on STDOUT).

Was that just a flaky copy/paste into the post?

update: Sorry, I'm probably missing the point completely here. In the first snippet, it's unclear to me why zentara (the original author) would do binmode on input and not on output -- I assumed that if you need binmode at all, you need it on both. As for the second snippet, merlyn was apparently assuming a OS environment where binmode was not necessary at all, and was using CGI.pm's functions for doing the content headers, boundaries, etc (so you shouldn't have been printing a header after that loop).

... but I need to have the script deliver the file anonymously.

Could you clarify what you mean by "anonymously"?

I don't want the user to see where the file is actually resident ( so they can't go back and download it again! ).

jdotornto

It should be sufficient if the file resides in a directory path that is not open to browsing by the web server (ie. lies outside the webroot path) or by an ftp server. So long as the outside path has permissions set such that the webserver user account can read files in that directory, the cgi script can fetch the file and send it to the client, but the client won't be able to get at the file any other way except through the cgi script.