However, my codes don't use cgi.pm, and I'm wondering whether I'm doing things the way I'm supposed to...

Wonder no more! You *aren't* doing things the way you're supposed to! Well, of course the glory of Perl is there *is* no way you're supposed to do things; but there are some ways which are so well tried (and the alternatives so provenly poor) that it makes no sense to do anything else. CGI.pm is one of them. I know. I went on for six months rolling my own and getting more and more tangled in coils of unaccountable legacy code and taking hours to script stuff that should have taken minutes. Then I made the very limited effort to read the CGI docs. And... well, let's just say I wish I'd done it earlier.

This is why you'll find few monks will answer your question directly. Most people here are so convinced, for good reasons, about CGI.pm that they feel, rightly, that it's a waste of everyone's time to help someone figure out how to do without it. (NB don't take it personally if somebody shoots down the question - it's just that it's been asked quite a few times before!)

§ George Sherston