Re: protecting downloadable files

I found it interesting that on 7/27/00 9:54 AM Paul Dalton said: > I would like to be able to protect files that are downloaded by > users. A colleague of mine sort of got this to work with perl. The > script is handed the filename as an arg and the script then opens the > file and sends it to stdout (i.e. the user) after setting the content > type to binary. This works, however the file that the user ends up with > always has the name of the script that was used to give them the file. > This makes sense I suppose. So, the question is, is there a way of > specifying the filename, or some other way of doing this (I'm hoping to > use PHP btw)? > > Hope I'm making myself clear here. I don't know if this was fixed in IE 5 or not but in IE 4 the content-disposition header wouldn't be recognized so you couldn't specify the filename correctly. Here is what I use in a perl script for sending a PDF document: print "Content-type: application/octet-stream; name=$filename\n"; print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename\n"; print "Content-Length: $size\n\n"; It's debated on the newsgroups whether you use: Content-Disposition: inline; .... Content-Disposition: attachment; .... or I've seen people use: Content-disposition: download; .... and they say it works. I use application/octet-stream rather than application/pdf because some people had trouble downloading the file if they didn't already have Acrobat installed (yes, some people don't) so octet-stream worked for both of those who have it installed and those who don't. -- Thomas Deliduka IT Manager ------------------------- New Eve Media The Solution To Your Internet Angst http://www.neweve.com/