cgi help

[nephish]

Hey there,
i am trying to write an online application using the cgi module.
what i want to do is have an html form display a drop-down list and
have the values of that list be the lines of text written in a file.
this would be updated almost every time the site is visited.
i have been sucessful in writing text to a file from an html form. but
i need to access this so it can be selected.
is there a way to do this? i have found limited info on how to really
use the cgi module.  so if there is more indepth tutorials or docs on
the use of this module, that may be helpful also.
what i mean is. i am willing to rtfm, if i can find one.
thanks,