I'm confused - is this about stealing flash or stealing bandwidth?

I sort of assume the latter, in which case you should be able to prevent linking without needing perl. If you can place a .htaccess file in your flash folder, you can specify valid http_referer values (or invalid http_referer values).

Assuming this is about stealing bandwidth (no way to stop people from saving your flash to their computers), and you're not into the Apache options posted above, this would be a way to serve up a file using CGI:

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;

my $flash_file = 'your_flash_file.swf';
open FLASH, '<', $flash_file or die $!;
binmode FLASH;

my $q = new CGI;
print $q->header(
                 -content-type   => 'flash/swf'
                 -content_Length => (stat FLASH)[7]
                );

my $buffer;
while (read(FLASH, $buffer, 1024) > 0){
    print $buffer;
}

close FLASH;
[download]

You may need to do some research on the HTTP headers to send along with the data. I am just guessing at the Content-type, for instance.

Hope this helps.

Yea thats the kind of solution I was looking for crashtest just wondered whether it was available to simply put content-type => flash/swf or whether it'd be more complex really... To reply to the others I can't stop hotlink access because i'm using the same website as they are, the access rules are a bit more complex than just that. And yes its about bandwidth, I don't care if someone steals my rubbishy 3mb music video (its literally the music with a pic of the album cover on it) its the fact everyone is just abusing my bandwidth and using my video on their own profiles and in all likelihood most people won't go to the effort of stealing mine and hosting it themselves.

Apparently its Content-type: application/x-shockwave-flash from my research although i'm still at a miss as to the content length variable since I don't understand HTTP headers all that greatly - and reading the w3 info on them isn't that useful.

Not a perl solution but use a hotlink protection in the .htaccess file, but rather than an image extesntion use .swf, ive used it with images, javascipt (.js) and css (.css)