I was unsure how this cgi formatted posts; apparently I should have included html tags. If only we could preview comments! Let me try again...

I ran your program, and the value I got for $! was "no such file or directory". So I tried this program:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print $!;

Sure enough, same error message. Apparently $! starts off defined; I don't know why, and I'd noticed before. So you might just want to start things off with: undef $!;