In addition to what's been said:

Please use descriptive titles like: "Our Computer Club is Looking For Perl/CGI Tutorials". Although I'm sure for you this is a major emergency, titles like: "Help!", "HELP!!, or your "Need Help Badly!!!" don't really — help — us know what your post is about and can even annoy some of the members.

As for your — problem, spending the hour writing code doesn't sound so bad to me. Is your club expecting to learn Perl and CGI in one hour? If so you're going to be disappointed. It takes a lot longer than that: Teach Yourself to Program in Ten Years.

If all you're going to spend on Perl/CGI (or any other language) is one hour I would say don't bother. Hang out, have a few beers or some coffee. Otherwise, if you — actually — have an interest in learning Perl/CGI for beginners I would try the online chapters of CGI Programming 101 by Jacqueline D. Hamilton

Also, understand that when you ask forum members to write a program for you, you are asking people you never met before to spend time working on your problem, free of charge. Don't you think that's a very big favor to ask considering many here make their living programming?

This is a great place to learn if that's what you're interested in doing.

But based on what I do understand, you're asking for a completed program that satisfies all the multi-path possibilities outlined above.

That's not gonna' happen; suggest you and your group spend Tuesday reading the FAQs and other guidance about Perl Monks and how to ask questions here:

• On asking for help
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery
• I know what I mean. Why don't you?
• Writeup Formatting Tips

We're here to help; not to serve up free code, so heed the advice above ... and then try again, next week, with code and far more limited specs.

"I was hoping someone with better knowledge could write the html and PERL/CGI script below so that we could go over it tomorrow and figure out how to do it ourselves."

Uh huh, go over it yourselves eh? This actually looks exactly like home/course work. I suggest reading the following and working through the example code where appropriate:

• http://learn.perl.org
• http://perldoc.perl.org
• Ovid's CGI Course
• The Tutorials section of this site.

Why don't you try this: Figure out how you would code the solution without worrying about login or CGI at all. For example, write a script that reads from <> for all input, and prints out the result as plain text. If you can solve the problem exclusive of CGI issues, you're halfway there. If you can't, you're not ready to layer in CGI anyway.

I'll tell you what: If you post a working non-CGI solution, I'll provide pointers on how to proceed from there on converting it to a CGI application.

Questions like these make me wonder: How did people learn things prior to the internet?

--Ray

You're supposing they're learning things now with it rather than just finding random schmucks to do them for them.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.