FAQ 9.6 How do I download a file from the user"s machine? How do I open a file on another machine?

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9.6: How do I download a file from the user's machine? How do I open a file on another machine?

In this case, download means to use the file upload feature of HTML
forms. You allow the web surfer to specify a file to send to your web
server. To you it looks like a download, and to the user it looks like
an upload. No matter what you call it, you do it with what's known as
multipart/form-data encoding. The CGI.pm module (which comes with Perl
as part of the Standard Library) supports this in the
start_multipart_form() method, which isn't the same as the startform()
method.

See the section in the CGI.pm documentation on file uploads for code
examples and details.



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