Matt@Ikonboard — Tue, 16 Jan 2001 11:42:07 +0000

Oh, and a good habit to get into is to be explicit about the file read/write request.

Use either '<$file' to read, '>$file' to write and '>>$file' to append. Using '$file' on it's own can lead to exploitation of the file while the data is being processed.

I got my ass burned at comp.lang.perl.misc for just using open FH, $File;

Matt@Ikonboard — Tue, 16 Jan 2001 11:38:23 +0000

Hi Rob, thanks for the welcome

Quote: Just curious, is there a reason to flock the file when reading content? I always thought that flock was only required when writing to a file?

I always lock to read and write out of habit. A file lock is conditional, so if it's locked to write (flock FH, 2 or better flock FH, LOCK_EX) and a non-locked request to read is made, the write lock is dropped and the data *can* be flushed before it's printed back.

I learnt that the hard way.

Rob Pengelly — Tue, 16 Jan 2001 03:39:01 +0000

Matt, sorry for not mentioning it before, but welcome to TWF, and thanks for your contributions so far!

Just a simple thing with your code, if he was planning on printing any output to the browser, he will need:

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
.

Here is my simple solution

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $file = 'filename.html';
print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";
open(IN,$file) or die "Cannot open $file: $!";
print while <IN>;
close(IN);

Just curious, is there a reason to flock the file when reading content? I always thought that flock was only required when writing to a file?

Matt@Ikonboard — Tue, 16 Jan 2001 03:01:01 +0000

How long is a piece of string?

Can you refine the question somewhat? If you want to take a HTML page, and include it for output in your script, then something like:

open FH, '</path/to/file.html' or die $!;
flock FH, 1 or die $!;
while (<FH>) { print $_ }
close FH;

Would do it.