Nicely done. I appreciate your sense of humor. I realize you are joking when you say "replacing apache". Here's my attempt to deobfuscate it.

<SPOILER FOLLOWS>

# Modified a little to get the spacing right 
# and to use strict.
# Some of this code looks like an example from
# The Perl Cookbook by Tom Christiansen p.606
use strict;
use IO::Socket;

# Specify the server home directory, port, 
# and "page found" status
my $home_dir="/tmp/";
my $port=1280;
my $response="HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nServer: ";
$response .= "PimpHTTPD\nConnection: close\n\n";
my $file_name;

# Open a listener server on the port we specified
my $server=new IO::Socket::INET->new(Listen=>1,
  LocalPort=>$port)||die("Can't listen: $!");

# Accept equests from the client
while(my $client=$server->accept())
{
  # Read client requests into scalar
  while(my $request=<$client>)
  {
    # Parse the file name to read in from the
    # GET request
    $file_name=$1 if($request=~/^GET\s+(\S+)/i);
    # Request is finished if there is a blank line
    last if($request=~/^\r?\s*\r?$/);
  }
  # Unescape escaped characters in the file name
  $file_name=~s/%([0-9A-Fa-f][0-9A-Fa-f])/hex($1)/g;
  # Ignore requests that try to read from the 
  # parent directory.
  if($file_name =~ /\.\.\//)
  {
    $response="INVALID URL"
  }
  else
  {
    # It's a good file name-- let's read it.
    # Open the in file and add it to the response.
    if(open(INFILE,"<$home_dir$file_name"))
    {
      while(<INFILE>)
      {
        $response.=$_;
      }
      close(INFILE);
    }
    else
    {
      # If we can't open the file, show the error.
      $response="$home_dir$file_name:$!"
    }
  }
  # Output the response to the client.
  print $client $response;
  # Close the client.
  $client->close;
}
[download]

-- Zeno - Barcelona Perl Mongers http://barcelona.pm.org http://www.javamonks.org