Managing File Downloads

i want to make some files available to certain people on my site. i don't want someone to be able to just type in the address to the file and be able to download it. I have seen this done in some form on many web pages and i have looked for some info on this but i guess i'm just not looking in the right places. So i was wondering what is the best and most secure way of achieving this would be. Any direction as to how to achieve this would be appreciated.

zip the files with a password

www.sitewizard.com
They have some good resources for web development.

DA

If your´re planning to do it with php, just try hotscripts.com, they have tons of ressources / code / ready made download tools including dB support and file logging for this purpose

Perhaps you can do something with .htaccess, if you're running Apache. Make a password file and authentication method.

Put the files to download outside of the DocumentRoot and then make a script or CGI which takes the referenced file and dumps the content back to the user, setting the appropiate mime type in the headers.

Don't zip the files with a password... At least, the old PKZIP stream cipher was broken ages ago, and I guess they might well use the same cipher in modern zip files for compat... In any case, I wouldn't trust it any further than I could heft it.