http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=21931


in reply to How can I transfer file from client? Futher problems inside...

Of course, the canonical reply would be to use CGI.pm which handles all of this nasty stuff quite well and comes with about every Perl distribution I know. CGI.pm also takes care of the tempfile creation, removal and I guess that there are no backdoors or exploits in CGI.pm itself.

There are at least two things wrong with the code :
First, no error checking. Opening a file should always be done like this (in my holy opinion) :

local *FILE; open( FILE, "> $file" ) or die "Couldn't create '$file' : $!\n"; ... close( FILE );
Of course, it's not always adequate to die(), but at least a warn is in place and for tools or CGI stuff, a die isn't bad, as the stuff will show up in the error log of the server.

The second thing is, that the file will be clobbered under Win32, as it is used for binary data and no binmode() is used on the file handle. This will not affect writing ASCII data in any way and it will also have no effect under UNIX platforms.

Looking further through the code, I see that $form_data is printed to STDOUT instead of (as it maybe should be ?) to FILE. Maybe that's already the error... Also, because there won't be more (or less) bytes available on STDIN than $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'} indicates, reading from STDIN could simply be done by using the following code :

{ local $/ = ""; $form_data = <>; }; # $form_data now contains the submitted stuff
But I would really use CGI.pm for such stuff like file submission !