Check out Cookies with out milk.

"cRaZy is co01, but sometimes cRaZy is cRaZy".
                                                      - crazyinsomniac

use CGI::Cookie;

my %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

People just don't want to learn. Most of the time when I look at scripts which I download from the web they use things like this:


        $buffer = "";
        read(STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'});
        @pairs=split(/&/,$buffer);
        foreach $pair (@pairs)
        {
                @a = split(/=/,$pair);
                $name=$a[0];
                $value=$a[1];
                $value =~ s/\+/ /g;
                $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1
+))/eg;
                $value =~ s/~!/ ~!/g;
                $value =~ s/\</\&lt\;/g;  # html tag removal (remove t
+hese lines to enable HTML tags in messages)
                $value =~ s/\>/\&gt\;/g;  # html tag removal (remove t
+hese lines to enable HTML tags in messages)
                $value =~ s/[\r\n]//g;
                if ($name eq "username") {
                        $value =~ s/\s*$//g;
                }
                push (@data,$name);
                push (@data,$value);
        }
        %form=@data;
        %form;
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Well I just gave up, there are even guys who develop websites and think I'm a idiot because I read the whole perldoc CGI!
I must admit the first time I worked with it I was a bit slower, but now it's rewarding because I code as fast as them but my code is a lot better/safer then the copy&paste from the my fellow coders. But this is going to change because next month I will write app's for our admin's.They wanted a perl-coder because they know writing safe perl-code is so cool :-)

--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right

So it's cool that you're using CGI.pm (at least if I read it right from my early morning brain here), but just in case the home audience doesn't see what's so wrong from this oft-repeated "cargo cult" junk:
• it doesn't handle a GET request instead of a POST
• an evil guy can give a huge content-length and overflow your system
• it doesn't handle the recommend ";" separator instead of "&"
• it mangles ~! in the content for some unknown reason
• while it fixes less-than and greater-than for HTML reasons, it doesn't patch up ampersand
• it folds possibly significant whitespace
• it removes trailing whitespace from a special field named username using a poor regex
• it creates the key/value pairs for a hash in separate arrays, rather than just assigning a new element directly
• it doesn't allow for SELECT MULTIPLE selection boxes or multiple fields with the same name, because the second value overwrites the first instead of adding to it
• it doesn't easily allow for file upload even to be grafted on the side
• it doesn't handle some of the recent CERT warnings about broken character set interpretations
all of which are handled properly by CGI.pm.

And here's the problem. Whoever wrote this probably copied most of it from someone else (or worse, one of those awful books out there), and now the next guy who comes along says "hey, do you have anything that handles the CGI stuff?" will probably steal this code for his own. Without realizing any of the brokenness.

That's why we say so adamantly: use CGI.pm! It's just too much work to keep pointing out these major errors over and over and over again.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

that code looks eerily similar to what we learned in the 1st edition of "CGI Programming with Perl". i see that there's a second edition out now, so i hope they've updated it. i remember writing lots of code with a sub that looked like that. of course, this was for a class and we tended to get marked down for using modules and not writing anything of our own. *shudders* yeck.

To save you some time, here are the basics:
Setting a cookie:

print "Content-type: text/html\n";
print "Set-Cookie: foo=bar; path=/; expires=Mon, 01-Jan-2001 00:00:00 
+GMT\n\n";
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@nvpairs=split(/; /, $ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'});
foreach $pair (@nvpairs) {
   ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair);
}
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$cookie{$name} = $value;
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Nowadays I use the CGI.pm module though. Much easier.
(Although I have run into a case where CGI.pm didn't work the way I needed it to.)