Well, I have not much experience with CGI programming. But if you tried his code as is then it's obvious it won't work. It's meant to be only a snippet. In particular you'll notice that there's a $regel variable that is supposed to be a full (relative or absolute) path to your document, but if you didn't set it explicitly, then it will be undefined. Sorry if I'm pointing out something obvious - if not then you should really read some introductory text about Perl first, and then some CGI tutorial as already advised. I may be wrong but I'm getting the impression that you're just copying and pasting code from somewhere else without really understanding it.

Sorry that I'm not good enough in expressing the idea in English. I do program enough in Perl and this is my testgif.pl script. Maybe this example is better.
=================================
in the html code I'm using is (ofcourse with the html-symbols around it:

img src="../cgi-bin/testgif.pl?werkplek.gif"
==================================
The Perl script is:

#!/bin/perl5.005_03 -w

use strict;
use CGI qw(:all);
my ($buffer);
if (open (INHOUD, "../docs/gemjcw/doc/sb/werkplek.gif")) {
binmode INHOUD;
print << "EOT1";
Content-Type: application/msword; filename="werkplek.gif"
EOT1
while (read(INHOUD, $buffer, 4096)) {
print $buffer;
}
close (INHOUD);
exit;

==========================
And the result is "Thu Jan 12 14:37:10 2006 error client 82.168.213.19 malformed header from script. Bad header=GIF89a(: /www/cust/y/3/3/5/33515/cgi-bin/testgif.pl"
==================================

Greetings, Ernst Verster

As I already said, I'm far from being an expert in this field of application. But apart that

• (I'd switch to a more recent perl if possible and) use warnings instead of -w;
• use a lexical filehandle and the 3-args (with "<:raw") form of open,

at first sight the only thing that I can guess is that

Content-Type: application/msword;
[download]

doesn't play well with a gif file: indeed the header is recognized as a GIF89a as printed in the error message. Did you try with an actual word doc? How 'bout a plain application/octet-stream if that doesn't work either? I for one would be happier to just download it rather than to directly open it even if I were on a Windows box...