Having just written code for handling selections of things for a recent job, I was curious about your code when I saw the posting. I took a different tact, though, but a few thoughts that might help.

First of all, my understanding of CGI.pm's handling of checkboxes is that if in your form you have a set of checkboxes named "boxes" such as <input type=checkbox name=boxes value="whatever" checked> , $q->param("boxes") returns a list of the values for the input boxes checked (including "whatever" for this one, unless unchecked). So you might do something like @todelete = $q->param("boxes"); then loop thru them.

Also, you might consider testing if $q->param("submit") is defined, then go from there, rather than seeing if any parameters are defined.

(I also posted a link to this response in your followup article, Shouldn't this return the named checkbox's value? )