Well, it might make sense, but it's not what I want. As I wrote above, the problem arose when I was trying to pass parameters from the query string to another script by constructing a link which contains these parameters. I used the following method (pseudocode):

In scriptA.pl, fill hash with all parameters from query string,
   using $q->url_param (and not $q->param)
Do something with the hash entries
Construct a new query string from the hash entries
Generate a link to scriptB.pl?<new query string>
[download]

Now, I if call

/cgi-bin/scriptA.pl

(without any parameters), the resulting link is

/cgi-bin/scriptB.pl?keywords=

i.e. there is an empty parameter "keywords" in the link which should not be there.

This was not acceptable for me. Solving that problem turned out not to be too easy because I wanted to keep the "keywords" parameter if it had been in the query string in the first place.

See my post below for additional misbehavior of CGI.pm and for how I solved the problem.

Regards,

Nocturnus