Any way to use a local file on web site?

What is your definition of "use"?  Are you wanting to make a word document available via a web server?

If so, then there are ways of doing what you want, but I would *highly* recommend that the easier, safer way, is to upload the word document to the web server.

You probably are concerned that the document accessed via webserver should be the latest document as exists on your personal system. In that case, you can setup scheduled tasks/cron jobs (depending on your webserver OS) to sync the document file with the webserver version.

Sorry Tintin and manav_mathur for not explaining in too much detail. I had to write the question extremely fast. What I want to be able to do might be a little bit more tricky.

I want to be able to have a LOCAL Accces database that has a name and file path of a text document ordered like manav_mathur said... the latest document first, and then have a script ON THE SERVER that reads from the database, gets the name and file path, opens the LOCAL word document by looking at the file path, and then intrepreting and displaying the contents of the word document to the client on his browser in HTML format.

Ideally, I want this to be done in perl for speed and familiarity issues, but if perl can't do it, then I could go for asp or jsp.

Thanks again and sorry for the vagueness,
-Stephen, CoFounder
Vehicle Aid (http://www.vehicleaid.com/)

you said it all yourself:
  install a database, for example mysql
  write a simple perl CGI using DB.pm
and you're re ready
Any more questions?

ahoffman,

Does that cover LOCAL files that are on my computer as well? I have experience using DBI and DB, but how do i set up the script to read something that is stored on my computer and not actually uploaded to the server?

Are you sure your connection has the necessary bandwidth? Is it always on? Do you really want to allow access from outside to your local computer?
You'd be far better off putting the documents and the database on the server machine, and access them from there.

what is the difference between "my computer" and "ON THE SERVER"?

the situtation would be my website being hosted by someone (e.x. futurequest, or godaddy), and then I would like a client to be able to read a word file from my computer without the hassle of uploading it...

that's my main concern by the way... i have so many files that get modified frequently and i would like for the user just to read from my machine so i don't have to worry about uploading... maybe im way off the mark... i don't know...

then again maybe there's a better way to manage the uploading... to where it could synchronize with my files... i know i can create a batch file that would allow me to upload all the files every night, but still even then there would always be some time span that the file would be looked at unmodified.

Well, thanks for all the input so far

If I were you, I'd make sure you have something working on the server (with your Access database and all), before worrying about the freshness of your documents. There are options enough to mirror a set of files (rsync for instance) that you could employ after that. Until then, I wouldn't unnecessarily complicate your application.

Alright, well, i'll look into rsync and other options. Thanks anyway for the comments and suggestions.