If I'm right in my guess about what you're trying to do, then the answer is "yes, CGI.pm does do it all for you". That's to say, if you're dealing with form input from a form that has a tag like <INPUT TYPE="FILE" NAME="FILENAME"> then if you do

my $fh = param('FILENAME');
while (<$fh>) {
    do_stuff_with($_);   # manipulate the file line by line
}
[download]

CGI.pm will deal with the path in the appropriate way - at least, that's been my experience when receiving input from browsers on Windows systems and processing it on a Linux system.

(BTW you might want to use the upload() method, but as this comes only with later versions of CGI.pm I mention the old-fashioned way, in case you are stuck with an annoying ISP.)

CGI.pm does the thinking so you can spend more time drinking beer :)

§ George Sherston