AM above was right though probably not helpful for you. There is no such method as retrieve in CGI::Session. The session and cookie handling are done by creating a new object. You can configure it many different ways but it should work out of the box with tmp files and an auto-named cookie following the examples directly.

# (mostly) From the tutorial link above-
use strict; # Important!
use warnings; # Ditto!
my $session = CGI::Session->new() or die CGI::Session->errstr;

Above line will first try to re-initialize an existing session by cons
+ulting cookies and necessary QUERY_STRING parameters. If it fails wil
+l create a brand new session with a unique ID, which is normally call
+ed session ID, SID for short, and can be accessed through id() - obje
+ct method.

We didn't check for any session cookies above, did we? No, we didn't, 
+but CGI::Session did. It looked for a cookie called CGISESSID, and if
+ it found it tried to load existing session from server side storage 
+(file in our case). If cookie didn't exist it looked for a QUERY_STRI
+NG parameter called CGISESSID. If all the attempts to recover session
+ ID failed, it created a new session.

[download]

I know you said you spent hours reading CPAN docs so you might have seen it already but that tutorial is pretty direct and you're not likely to get a better answer anywhere. Your username prompts the following jest-

s/(?<=Reading )[^.]+(?=.)/is fundamental/;

I know how frustrating some of this can be at first. I've done the same hours of reading or 500 permutations on a theme based on an assumption. But stick with it. It gets more fun all the time. :)

Oh, all right. Just thinking about the days I wasted early on because I was just missing some simple piece... Here, you go, a minimal working example. You should be able to play with configuration and code order pretty easily from this-

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI::Session;
use CGI qw( h1 p );
use CGI::Carp "fatalsToBrowser";

my $session = CGI::Session->new or die CGI::Session->errstr;

print $session->header();

if ( $session->param("visits") )
{
    print h1("Welcome back!");
    print p(
            sprintf("You've been here %d time%s.",
                    $session->param("visits"),
                    $session->param("visits") == 1 ? "" : "s",
                   )
            );
}
else
{
    print h1("Welcome first time visitor");
}
$session->param( visits => $session->param("visits") + 1 );

[download]

In reply to Re: accessing session variables across different pages by Your Mother
in thread accessing session variables across different pages by s/^Perl/pain/i

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