Hello All,
Thanks for replying,
That was just the first few lines. I actual code is running perfectly well. I did change it from use CGI; to 
use CGI qw( :standard ); (It was that way and I changed it to just CGI upon reading a few solutions!)

Also, my bad.. it is #!/usr/bin/perl in the program too.. just that I kept sudo - ing through so many folders looking for the DB..  
Any other suggestions are welcome..
Thanks.