How can I maintain a session cookie?

[yschang]

I would like maintain a session cookie to track users on my site, but the session cookie should be destoryed once the user closes all copies of their browser. How can do it?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[Anonymous Monk]

First of all use the CGI module, it'll make your life easier in general, not just dealing with cookies.

use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);

$q = new CGI;

# Create a 11 character random string as a
# session id. (Yes, it's swiped from the perl cookbook:-)

@chars = ( "A" .. "Z", "a" .. "z", 0 .. 9 );
$usersession = join("", @chars[ map { rand @chars } (1 .. 11) ]);

# Set a cookie that expires when
# the user closes their browser

$initcookie = $q->cookie(
              -name=>'User_Session',
              -value=>$usersession,
              -expires=>'', # leave this blank
              -path=>'/',
              -domain=>'www.somewebsite.com',
              -secure=>0
              );
print $q->header(-cookie=>$initcookie);

For more info on the CGI module, go to: http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/ Shawn

[turnstep]

Basically, any cookie that has NO expiration date, or an expiration date in the past (according to the user's system) will not be stored in the cookie.txt (or equivalent) file on the hard drive when the browser exits.

[lindex]

Re: How can I maintain a session cookie?

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.