I have a couple of perl powered web pages that are used for monitoring servers/services at $work. I'm not at $work at the moment, but IIRC, for the pages that I want to have automatically refresh themselves I put the following in the header (where refresh is usually 90 or 300 depending):

# config stuff:
  my $cfg = {
     refresh  => 300,
     interval => 5,
     };

# at some point later in the script:

  my $expires = strftime("Expires: %a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT\n", 
    gmtime(time+60*$cfg->{interval}));

  print <<"EOF";
Content-Type: $content_type
Refresh: $cfg->{refresh}
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: $expires

EOF
[download]

No javascript needed.

Hello. Thanks gsiems. I get it. I will open a window to display the results of the SNMP poll or whatever, and use the Refresh thing to display. Needless to say, the CGI is Perl only, and I want it to work with most of today browsers.

--
cmic. Life helps. Perl Too.

If you are not willing to use NPH because some browsers don't support it, then really your only option is to use Refresh: headers (or meta refresh tags) and redraw the whole page every time... NPH is more widely supported than javascript is.

NPH is a feature of the web server, not the browser.

More clarification on why you're trying to do what you're doing will help us explain the best way to do it.