Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL

asifk1981 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks, I am trying to upload ms-word documents from windows machine to my unix box, using perl. What I do is , read the doc into a buffer and then print it onto to a file in the unix box. Even though this works fine with html and text files, I am seeing extra junk data uploaded, when I try uploading MS-WORD documents. The uploaded file contains lot of junk data in it. How do I make sure that only the content of the word document is read and printed onto the file in the unix server? Please shed some light on this..Thanks in advance.

Comment on Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL

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Re: Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL by Joost (Canon) on Jul 11, 2005 at 16:32 UTC
You probably want binmode. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply]
Re: Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL by samtregar (Abbot) on Jul 11, 2005 at 19:18 UTC
How are you determining that the Word file contains "extra junk"? Are you opening it with Word or just looking at in a text editor. I'm wondering if you're interpreting perfectly valid binary data in the Word file as "extra junk." For what's worth it seems unlikely that binmode() will help. It's a rare Unix that can't write binary data to disk without help. You're not running Redhat 8.0, are you? -sam	[reply]
Re: Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL by davidrw (Prior) on Jul 11, 2005 at 16:47 UTC
y, as Joost said, bunmode is a likely culprit.. But what method/protocol are you using (http/ftp/scp/nfs/etc)? Can we see code? If the unix box directory is available to the windows box (my best guess as to what you're doing), are you using File::Copy? That would avoid you needing to read/write yourself.	[reply]
Re^2: Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL by asifk1981 (Novice) on Jul 11, 2005 at 17:04 UTC
The outline of the code that carries out the activity is `$q = CGI::new(); my $filename = $q->param('docname'); binmode($filename); if (open(OUTPUT, ">$output") \|\| openError ()) { $Data = read( $filename, $buffer, BUFFER_SIZE ); }` [download] Even with the introduction of the binmode($filename) statement , the problem persists..Please advice me....	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Uploading ms-word docs onto unix box using PERL by davidrw (Prior) on Jul 11, 2005 at 17:38 UTC
Ah -- CGI .. so that the client is windows and host unix doesn't really matter... anyways, i think you need to do `binmode OUTPUT` .. Read the entire (especially the very last part: Be sure to call binmode() on any handle that you create to write the uploaded file to disk.) "CREATING A FILE UPLOAD FIELD" section in the CGI docs. You may also be interested in the `my $fh = $p->upload('docname')` usage as well.	[reply] [d/l] [select]