This perl library uses perl5 objects to make it easy to create Web fill-out forms and parse their contents. This package defines CGI objects, entities that contain the values of the current query string and other state variables. It provides functionality for some of the more advanced features of CGI scripting, including support for file uploads, cookies, cascading style sheets, server push, and frames.

An extensible CGI parameter validation module (allowing commonly used checks on parameters to be called more concisely and consistently).

Send the HTTP 401 UnAuthentified header if a condition (by default "defined $ENV{REMOTE_USER}") fails. Since your script doesn't get the password the user entered, you cannot use it as the only authentification scheme. And it was not intended to work like this. You have to find some other way to check the username/password pair.

The "base" CGI module, which contains methods for accessing environment variables and other common functions such as log handling.

The CGI::Base module simplifies CGI debugging by providing logging methods (which redirect STDERR to a file) and a very handy test mode. The test mode automatically detects that the script is not being run by a HTTP server and requests test input from the user (or command line).

Additional functions that give CGI::Base the ability to handle the multipart forms created by the "file upload" feature of Netscape 2.0.

This module implements a CGI::BasePlus object that is identical in behavior to CGI::Base except that it provides special handling for postings of MIME type multipart/form-data (which may get very long). In the case of these types of postings, parts that are described as being from a file upload are copied into a temporary file in /usr/tmp, a filehandle is opened on the temporary files, and the name of the filehandle is returned to the caller in the $CGI::Base:QUERY_STRING variable.

The module allows the authors of the scripts to concentrate on the real goals of the script, like getting the parameters, checking them, fetching data from files or database and building the parts of the output page as you go or changing the expire date or cache pragma depending on the results.

Perl extension to help cache output of time-intensive CGI scripts so that subsequent visits to such scripts will not cost as much time.

Produce nicely-formatted error log messages.