Thanks for all your replys. This code is for a college computing asignment and we are supposed to use as little of other peoples code as possible. I know that there are huge advantages to using CGI.pm and for other stuff I would use it but if I can avoid it, it would be great as I can get more coding marks (besides, the server this is on only runs on my LAN behind a firewall so security is not a huge concern :) The parse_form that is required is the one by Craig Patchett & Matthew Wright from the CGI/Perl Cookbook.