Thanks for the help... I found out that I had commited the ultimate perl sin: my shebang line was wrong!!! The path to perl on the web server is different then on the machine i have shell access on; that's why the script ran in the terminal and not on the server. I just dropped a local in the path and it worked... so now i get to go a step further and make it replace the links to pass through my script and everything will be great.

This really isn't as michevious as it sounds. I'm a sysadmin here so I don't have anything to worry about...

josh