what's with the quotes...

Typo from copying the code over to my browser. Should be:  open ( FIN, "$html2ps 'http://mypage.com/index?param=x&foo=y' |" );

you're not testing that open with an "or die"...

You are right, I should do that. But, as I said in my original post, I know from debugging that I'm getting past this point correctly.

Thanks.