You don't really give enough information on how your app is structured (gui, cmdline, web, windows or *nix, etc). So I'll just assume it's a normal script running under *nix. Rather than doing something within perl, I would suggest you just fork/exec rview (a restricted, read only version mode of vim).

Essentially being able to use an editor or have the same sort of functions as an editor (like vi) but not be able to break out of it to the operating system command line level. Is there a way of allowing secure file viewing from within Perl ?

So, for example, you could use the following code to test if the file is readable:

if (-r $filename) { 
  #do stuff here with the file
}
else {
  carp "Cannot read file $filename\n";
}
[download]

However, it sounds like you may be essentially trying to write a text editor in perl. Why? If userfriendliness is an issue and people don't know how to use emacs/vi, there are plenty of other editors out there that are more userfriendly, like joe. If you have a GUI available, there are gui versions of vi (gvim) or emacs available.

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Burvil * http://www.burvil.org *