in reply to Passing a username/password from HTML to a Perl script

.htaccess security happens at the web server level. It only comes up when a user tries to access documents in that directory through an HTTP request. Your Perl CGI is running at the OS level. It's only stoped from reading/writing files if the system permissions don't allow it to. htaccess won't stop it at all.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be
manipulated, and ended up creating an object
system by accident. -- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom