actually I own my own server and want to go to the command line and type perl myscript.pl {pass form variable}

Yes, and since your original question mentioned passing form data from the command line I naturally understand that to mean that you have a CGI script you want to run from the command line (possibly for debugging purposes to find out why it's hanging peoples' browsers). And if you are using: 'use CGI;' in myscript.pl, then you just do what my previous answer suggested: invoke the script from the command line with each form variable enumerated on the command line as key="value". Your script does use CGI.pm, right? If so, my previous advice was accurate whether you own your own server or use someone else's.