The Best way to do what you're trying to would be to look into the CGI module from CPAN. There are all sorts of nifty subs in that module that make any CGIer's life way easier. For instance (from the docs), here's a "Hello World" page done with the functions from CGI.pm:

   #!/usr/local/bin/perl
   use CGI qw/:standard/;           # load standard CGI routines
   print header,                    # create the HTTP header
         start_html('hello world'), # start the HTML
         h1('hello world'),         # level 1 header
         end_html;                  # end the HTML
[download]

And the icing on the cake is that CGI should be already installed in your existing distribution of Perl!

LAI