What is happening is some html magic. The browser will automatically retreive an imageURL if it's in the html tag for the image, and it will end up in the browser's cache. So your cgi program is telling the client's browser to "look at this url" for an image, and the browser does it. So if you open this html file on your local machine, and open it in a browser, you will see the image, but the image is buried deep in the browser's catch. 
<HTML>
<BODY>
<IMG SRC="http://www.zentara.net/anim_a_s_r.gif" HEIGHT=65  WIDTH=75 a
+lt="[zentara]" align=left>
</BODY>
</HTML>

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So your cgi script does nothing but pass that url to the browser, it does not get the file.

The gobbldeeGook which you get when you use lwp to retreive the file, is the actual binary data of the image. You need to save it to a scalar( or a temp file) then run your image info routine on it. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Image::Info qw(image_info dim);

my $data = get("http://www.learntogoogle.com/images/addform.jpg");

# this will print binary junk 
#print "$data\n"; 

my $info = image_info( \$data );
  if (my $error = $info->{error}) {
           die "Can't parse image info: $error\n";
       }
my($w, $h) = dim($info);

print "$w $h\n";

[download]
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

In reply to Re^3: Unexpected Image::Info failure by zentara
in thread Unexpected Image::Info failure by sulfericacid

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