Sorry to bother again, but this program is just too damned hard to debug! I'm writing a login script for the administrative part of the DSGO. But cgi::carp is telling me when I extract my cookie, I can't get any fields. I figure, this is probably because the cookie isnt set, but %cookies is defined, so how do i confirm this so i dont get an error? I think it may be something even worse than that, because if i comment out the part where it makes $users and $pass the cookie fields it gives me an internal error screen, not even a cgi::carp error.

the code is below

#!/usr/bin/perl   

#1 load my modules
  use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser set_message);
  use CGI::Cookie;
  use CGI qw/:standard/;

#2 will write variable loader later
  $domain = "betterwebber.com";

#3 set up error handler
  BEGIN {
    sub handle_errors {
        my $msg = shift;
        print "<h1>ERROR</h1><br>";
        print "message: $msg";
    }
    set_message(\&handle_errors);
  }  
 
#4 fetch cookies
  %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;
  $user = $cookies{'user'}->value;
  $pass = $cookies{'pass'}->value;
 
#5 send user to the login page if not logged in
  $loggedin = &checklogin($user, $pass);
  &loginpage if $loggedin = 0;

  
#THE MENU
  if ($loggedin = 1) {
    print "you are logged in";
  }

#6 checklogin - sub checking user and pass

  sub checklogin {
    my $userdef = $_[0];
    my $passdef = $_[1];

    open (FILE, "users.dat");

    $usergood = 0;
    foreach $userdata (<FILE>) {
      ($usertmp, $passtmp, $accessleveltmp, $emailtmp) = split(/''/, $
+userdata);
      if ((lc($usertmp) eq lc($userdef)) && (crypt($passdef, $passtmp)
+ eq $passtmp)) {
        $usergood = 1;
      }
    }
    close (FILE);
    return ($usergood);
  }

#7 loginpage - sub that logs in user
  sub loginpage {

    my $userdef = "";
    my $passdef = "";

    if (param()) {
      $userdef = $query->param('user');
      $passdef = $query->param('pass');
    }

    if (&checklogin($userdef, $passdef) == 0) {
      #desplay login html
      print header,
            start_html('Login Page'),
            hr;
            h1('You are not logged in.  Please do.'),
            start_form,
            "Username: ", textfield('user'),p,
            "Password: ", textfield('pass'),p,
            submit,
            end_form,
            hr;
      print %cookies;
    } else {  
      #set cookie and display redirect page   

      $user = new CGI::Cookie(-name    =>  'user',
                              -value   =>  $userdef,
                              -domain  =>  'betterwebber.com',
                              -secure  =>  1
                             );
 
      $pass = new CGI::Cookie(-name    =>  'pass',
                              -value   =>  $passdef,
                              -domain  =>  'betterwebber.com',
                              -secure  =>  1
                             );
  
      $selfurl = $query->self_url;

      print header(-cookie=>[$user,$pass]);
    
      print start_html('Loggin in...'),
            h1('Logging in (hang tight)...'),
            hr;

      print "<script language='javascript'>top.location.href = '$selfu
+rl'</script>"
    }
  }
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