Thanks, this is a great reply. I'm sorry the question was badly phrased and I'm grateful for the thoughtfulness of most of the responses.

The files are on a remote server and this is for users of a web site. The files are industry specific and not of interest to most of society, but should be kept confidential. Therefore I think a level of obfuscation would be sufficient, rather than a need for high level out and out security.

I have the login and file listing part of the service, and what I'm thinking about doing is creating a cron which periodically creates a new name for the folder, and records it in a db. The loading script uses that record to create the link, and there is a web page or ajax refresh of the links to keep them updated on the page.

I think this would be quite efficient in terms of preventing the file links from being shared between interested parties, however I'm sure that there are probably more efficient processes I could use. I would be interested in knowing yours and other thoughts on this?


In reply to Re^2: script to access private folder by Anonymous Monk
in thread script to access private folder by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.