Practical Internet Groupware

Setting a Cookie

Here’s a generic Perl fragment that sets a cookie:

print "Content-type: text/html\n";
print "Set-Cookie:
            ProductAnalysisSubscriber=Aladdin%00926515678%00192.168.1;
            path=/cgi-bin; expires=Wed, 11-May-2000 00:00:00 GMT\n\n";

Or to continue with ASP-based PerlScript as in Example 12.4:

$Response->AddHeader("Set-Cookie", 
      ProductAnalysisSubscriber=Aladdin%00926515678%00192.168.1;
      path=/cgi-bin; expires=Wed, 11-May-2000 00:00:00 GMT\n\n";

On a Windows machine, when user Jon is logged in and the web server is localhost, Internet Explorer records that information in the file c:\WINNT\Profiles\Jon\Cookies\[e-mail].

On the same Windows machine, Communicator adds the following line to c:\program files\Netscape\users\jon\cookies.txt:

localhost   FALSE   /   cgi-bin   FALSE   958035600   ProductAnalysisSubscriber
     Aladdin%00926515678%00192.168.1

Table 12.1 lists the elements of this cookie.

Table 12-1. Anatomy of a Cookie

Element	Description
localhost	Which domain or specific server created and can read back the cookie? Use DOMAIN=.DomainName.com if multiple servers in a domain need to read the cookie.
FALSE	Can all machines in the server’s domain read the cookie? Defaults to FALSE. Only a single server can read it. Note that regardless of this setting, no server outside the cookie’s domain of origin can read it.
/cgi-bin	For which set of URLs will the browser send the cookie? In this case, only for scripts run from /cgi-bin. Defaults to /.
FALSE	Will your browser send its ...