Superb, thank you for the answers and all the examples - exactly what I needed to push me along for learning Perl, despite having a typo in my code.

The socks example was exactly what i meant for testing, without saying succinctly what it was; the code example will be useful for my project.

To clarify (for me, and for other new learners), CGI::Fast is a "wrapper" for FCGI module. The reason for trying FCGI was following the advice from https://metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Fast "CGI::Fast is based on CGI.pm it is no longer advised as a way to write Perl web apps". I am neutral on other's peoples use of CGI.pm, but as for myself, I want to move away from this module. I will acknowledge that CGI.pm has a great crash course in learning Perl.

best, knox