That is the output from Data::Dumper. You can see the cookies hash (aliased here to $VAR1) is empty. Otherwise, it might output something like:

[Thu Mar 9 12:33:53 2017] manage_users.cgi: $VAR1 = {'CGISESSID' => '1
+234deadbeef'};
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For a quasi-independent test, what happens when you add the following to your code:

use CGI;

my $cgi    = CGI->new;
warn $_ for $q->cookie();
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and see if the CGI object has any cookies in it.