You're in luck. CGI.pm is built to allow testing of CGI scripts from the command line. You can save, and load, query objects from files, or you can type in the name-value pairs on the command line. See perldoc CGI on your system and search for "command line" (the default handling changed recently, so I've heard), and
read the section "CREATING A NEW QUERY OBJECT FROM AN INPUT FILE" for info on how to load a query from a file.
HTH.
perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>);
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'