Sending named files via CGI

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

Uhm, I have a CGI that's generating dynamic web logs, or simply sending a stored copy of the web log. I'm wondering if there's any MIME header I can send to a web browser to have it change the filename of what I'm sending instead of having it use the script name ??? For example:

www.blah.org/cgi-bin/get-weblog?param=foo&param2=foo2
[download]

the web browser by default wants to save the file as 'get-weblog', but I want it to save it as a different filename by default..

Any ideas??

Comment on Sending named files via CGI Download Code

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Re: Sending named files via CGI by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 17, 2001 at 22:49 UTC
See my column on that. It's also been discussed before in here, so you should quickly learn about Search and Super Search. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re: Sending named files via CGI by Rhandom (Curate) on Apr 18, 2001 at 01:46 UTC
Even though this is in the places merlyn mentioned above ... if you search for it... Most browsers will typically use whatever is after the last / in the url. So, it you go to http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mycgi it will try to download and save the file as "mycgi". To take care of this (assuming you are using Apache), just add on another file name. For example http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mycgi/myrealfilename.txt . Apache will parse up the directory tree until it finds an executabe, in this case "cgi-bin/mycgi". After that the rest will get stuffed in the variable $ENV{PATH_INFO}. In this case $ENV{PATH_INFO} would contain "/myrealfilename.txt". If you begin the download when the file matches http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mycgi/myrealfilename.txt the user will be prompted to save "myrealfilename.txt".	[reply]