Please, read carefully. I need a way to use session variables for setting permissions/authenticating WITHOUT using cookies. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Sessions may just help for "keep in memory" which user your cgi-s are working with. If you don't want to use cookies, just use PHPSESSID in the url.
There is a good tutorial on zend.org on how to use the sessions with or without cookies.
Have a look : http://zend.org/zend/tut/session.php#propag
-- Patrick