So I'm looking to password protect my directories and/or file using a .htaccess file. What I'm curious to know is if there's a way to access these files through code without displaying the annoying popup box. My main code is PHP.

Essentially I have files that can be downloaded that shouldn't be accessed by anyone not logged. I plan to password protect them but I'd like the login username/password to all be done invisibly so that if they are logged in it will begin the download, and if they're not it will display another page.

Any help or tips would be great! Thanks

Won't happen "invisibly" with .htaccess security.

Use PHP and cookies/sessions

Well I have that as well to handle the UI stuff but what I'm looking for is a way to protect it so that you can't copy the URL to somebody and have them download it as well without the proper permissions. Is this even possible with any type of coding?

What's to stop people sharing their login details?

Setting the download URL to a page that checks for a logged in user then starts the download, without ever exposing the actual download URI is about as close as you can get.

Another way of protecting downloads might be to only allow a user to download something once. This might be more trouble than its worth though.