Kathy181249: s there a way to have a link on an html page that will display the contents of the .dat file in plain text?

As the other answers suggest, you have to
write a 'reader program' which is stored some-
where and is accessible via /cgi-bin/ (in your case).

The file could roughly look like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# [plain] (no extension)
# dump some /cgi-bin/ (or other) file in plaintext mode
# 1) file must be in the same dir as script
# 2) server has to provide PATH_INFO
# 3) call with: http://my.server.org/cgi-bin/plain/textfile.dat
#    if 'plain' is the scripts name
#
 my ($fn) = $ENV{SCRIPT_FILENAME} =~ /(.+?)[^\/]+$/g;
 $fn .= $1 if $ENV{PATH_INFO} =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
 print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

 if( -f $fn ) {
    open my $fh, '<', $fn or warn "$!";
    local $/;
    print <$fh>
 }
 else {
    print "($fn not found)\n"
 }
[download]

As shown above, you name this snippet eg. "plain" and invoke it by
    http://my.server.org/cgi-bin/plain/textfile.dat
(It uses the PATH_INFO Environment variable.)

Remember to get the access and user rights correct
when saving your stuff in /cgi-bin/

Regards

mwa