Thank you tachyon. In writing the dummy script, I left all the "use" statements in place for various modules that the (quite old) original script used. (and of course, for brevity I left them out of my post here - d'oh!)

amongst them was a "common" module that parsed form data into a Hash %common::field.

So, when CGI is used after, STDIN is empty because it has already been read.

And I spent 2 F&*^%ing hours looking for a complicated solution. Ah well, always the way...

Thanks all for your comments. Now all I have to do is find out which scripts use the "common" module and slowly move them over to CGI...

cLive -;)

--
seek(JOB,$$LA,0);