Setting referer with HTTP::Request and LWP::UserAgent

[punch_card_don]

Moonlit Monks,

My Perl script at www.anotherdomain.com/cgi-bin/bar/myscript.pl needs to redirect to an html page that is at www.mydomain.com/foo/page.htm To ensure that this page can be accessed only by a redirect from my script - I know I'll get heat for this, but bear with me - I propose to put an htaccess file in the foo directory that will accept requests only from one specific, imaginary, referer. Then, have myscript set the referer header that accompanies its redirect.

To do that, I lifted this code from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/sampchap/5612c.aspx

use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST GET);
use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$req = POST 'http://www.northwindtraders.com/dologin.asp',  
     [  Username => 'mike',
        Password => 'mypa$w0rd',
     ];
$req->header(Referer => 'http://www.northwindtraders.com/login.html');
$res = $ua->request($req);

changing northwindtraders.com to mydomain.com

But it doesn't work for me. I get the dreaded Server Error.

Any advice on either how to make this code work, or other ways to do the same thing, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Anonymous Monk]

If all you want is a redirect, why use LWP?

use CGI;
print CGI->header(
  -nph =>1,
  -Referer => 'http://www.northwindtraders.com/login.html',
  -location => 'www.mydomain.com/foo/page.htm',
);
__END__
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: cmdline
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2009 15:38:40 GMT
Location: www.mydomain.com/foo/page.htm
Referer: http://www.northwindtraders.com/login.html
Content-Type: text/html

[punch_card_don]

That's very cool, so I put it in myscript.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;
print CGI->header(
   -nph =>1,
   -Referer => 'http://www.northwindtraders.com/login.html',
   -location => 'www.mydomain.com',
 );

I get the exact same output from the command line - huge step forward, thanks - but surfing to the script with a browser still produces Internal Server Error.

What am I missing?

[Anonymous Monk]

Read CGI Help Guide and check your error logs

[Anonymous Monk]

CGI Help Guide