I'm writing a CGI where I'd like the user to select a layout for a series of thumbnails, and store that selection in a cookie, but let the user override the value stored in the cookie by changing their selection via a link. I thought I'd get away without having several big if/elsif/else blocks (there are a few user-definable parameters) by using the following code:

use CGI qw/:standard/;
use CGI::Cookie;

#...

my %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;

#...

$rows = $cookies{'rows'}
  ? ( param( 'rows' ) ? param( 'rows' ) : $cookies{'rows'}->value )
  : ( param( 'rows' ) and param( 'rows' ) =~ /^\d{1,2}$/ ? param( 'row
+s' ) : 5);

#...

my $rowscookie = new CGI::Cookie(  -name => 'rows',
                                  -value => $rows,
                                -expires => '+3M',
                                );

#...

print header(-cookie=>[$rowscookie,$colscookie]);

#...
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... which I thought was working fine until I tried it from a browser that didn't already have a cookie, in which I noticed that I get _no_ value in $rows.

I've been scratching my head on this for a little while, and have deduced that I'm having trouble seeing the error of my own ways, and I'm hoping someone else can point a finger at my problem. I've included the other relevant code in case the problem lies outside my nested ternaries.

Note: $colscookie is constructed exactly the same way, and is suffering exactly the same problem.

Update: Not sure if it's obvious from the code, but failing the presense of a cookie value or a link param, I'd like it to default to 5.

$/  =  q#(\w)#  ;  sub  sig { print scalar reverse  join  ' ',  @_  } 
+ sig
map { s$\$/\$/$\$2\$1$g && $_ } split( ' ', ",erckha rlPe erthnoa stJu
+" );
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