There is more than one way to do it.

Of course there is. There are thousands of ways of outputting "Just another Perl hacker.\n" too, and yet, none is easier, clearer, and more robust than:

print "Just another Perl hacker.\n";
[download]

When the job can be best accomplished with a hammer don't try using a heavy wrench or the heel of a shoe to drive a nail, unless of course, you're just showing off. ;)

Wow. I thought bad-mouthing CGI was apostacy around the Monastery. I'd like to hear more. Anyway, in the original post, I was trying to avoid CGI, HTML, forms, etc., but now know that for my application, it won't work.

—Brad
"A little yeast leavens the whole dough."

In short I think CGI.pm is slow bloated and unintuitive. The bloat comes from trying to support two hundred different options from generating html to parsing uris to header types and stuff ot that nature. It's slow, well, it just is! Look for benchmarks vs cgi::lite/simple. As for unintuitive, this is purely subjective of course, but I vastly prefer the cgi::lite approach where I have one method, parse_form_data, which takes a 'form data type' field and returns a nice simple hash. I can then use this hash however I want. It's simple.