You don't need to know the path on the client or even the IP address of the client. If the client's user agent is working properly, it will encode and POST the file to the server. CGI.pm provides mechanisms to access the uploaded file safely and sanely.

I think you must have  <form ... enctype="multipart/form-data"> in the HTML form in order to make the client's user agent encode the form, including the file's contents, in the multipart/form-data encoding. And then CGI.pm will help parsing it.

use CGI;
my $q=new CGI;
my $file=$q->param('foo'); #foo is the name of the file field in the f
+orm
print "You uploaded $file:"; #$file is the name of the file
print <$file>; #and it can also be used as a file handle to get the co
+ntents of the file
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Here's a relevant snippet from the CGI.pm docs:

To be safe, use the upload() function (new in version 2.47). When called with the name of an upload field, upload() returns a filehandle, or undef if the parameter is not a valid filehandle.

     $fh = $query->upload('uploaded_file');
     while (<$fh>) {
           print;
     }
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This is the recommended idiom.

This article shows a practical example.

Use something like this to check your CGI.pm version:

Hope this helps...

--f