Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Handling Binary Content

There are several common text-based content types that you might generate with CGI scripts besides HTML. For example, you might want to send images, audio files, or Zip archives to your users via a CGI program. The first step is to set the content type appropriately—the second step is to send the binary content to the user as the body of the request. Sending a text file is simple, here’s a very short script that will do the trick:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl 
use CGI; 
my $query = new CGI; 
print $query->header(-type=>'text/plain'); 
open (FILE, "< some_file.txt") 
    or die "Can't open some_file.txt"; 
while (<FILE>) { 
    print; 
} 

Sending a binary file to the user is slightly more complex. First, let’s look at a simple script that opens ...