That's what CGI.pm does when the program is run from the command line. Typically it operates in a CGI environment (duh ;-), where it gets form input from the environment or STDIN. But when the script is run from the command line, it would be a pain to do the requisite formatting which your script would undo anyway, so CGI.pm puts up that prompt to allow you to put in form variable pairs directly, before the script runs. I just kind of assumed everybody had used CGI.pm before, whoops :-). Oh yeah, Ctrl-D inputs EOF on *nix systems; use Ctrl-Z for Windows.