If there is any way to have a perl script login as the user who's home directory it has been copied to, that is what I really need to know.
That is entirely out of the purview of Perl. You need to work with the web server administrator to set this up. Since I don't know which web server package is in play here I can't even begin to comment on how this is done and I've administered my share of web servers over the years.
Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg