How do you access the HTTP basic authentication username from perl?

Question

I need to get the remote user name in my CGI script. Where do I find that? I want to display that name on the page that I return.

Answer 1

Under the CGI spec, the HTTP-auth user name will be in the environment variable REMOTE_USER. In Perl you can get this via $ENV{REMOTE_USER}.

You can find descriptions of all the standard CGI environment variables, including REMOTE_USER, in section 4 of RFC 3875.