UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi,

First, I wasn't sure if my question is appropriate for this forum. Still, I post here as I have a great respect for the knowledge that flows here.

Below are the details of my web application
File Server - Windows NT (End user files are stored)
Storage type - SAN (Storage area network)
Web server - Apache 2.0.58. on HPUX
Coding - Perl (Uses LWP download for http access)
Note: The files are first downloaded to web server and then users download the same from web server to local machine.

As the upload of user file is through a different tool, there is no visibility on its architecture. My application is used by users to download those files.

I use file <filename> to get the file attributes. I check for types cpio, gz or compress and take appropriate action. If the file is of type .pkg then I do nothing before download.

With the above state, the .exe files that are downloaded are corrupted. I mean they are not the same as the ones that are uploaded. Please help, I can explain more.

Regads

It could be possible that your application is downloading files in ascii format instead of binary format.

This is a common mistake while using a ftp client for example.

No luck :-( My suspision was exactly that; below is the code that I changed to see if that was the cause. I am not very sure what happens with the LWP download (LWP is a perl module). I am not very good in Perl. I learnt Perl for this application.

open(DLFILE, "<$files_location$_[0]") || Error('open', 'file');
@fileholder = <DLFILE>;
close (DLFILE) || Error ('close', 'file');

print "Content-length: $filesize\n";
# print "Content-Type:application/x-download\n";
print "Content-Type:application/binary\n";
print "Content-Disposition:attachment;filename=$_[0]\n\n";
print @fileholder;

Well, we are in two

I'm sure that someone else in these forums could give you much more help than me on Perl

Are you really supposed to add headers like that smack dab in the file itself? It's a thing commonly done by a server so it might be perfectly okay but if you are adding headers where you're not supposed to, that's pretty sure to destroy the file.

Thanks Era,

At least to my knowledge there is no redundant header. Not sure if there is any check point or debug for that kind of an issue. Again, I appear dumb when there is a challenge with Perl or HTML. Regards.

Can you tell what the difference is between the original file and the corrupted one? That would be a good way to troubleshoot this.

Does this only happen to .EXE files, or any type of file?

I don't think there is any issue with your Perl code per se; but if it's running in the wrong context, it's modifying the file itself, rather than adding metainformation into the headers.