I think some of the confusion here has to do with the way both programs are to be executed. Here's what I think you want, and here's how to do it. I'm assuming that the 1.pl program (a CGI) is no available to you to modify (or this whole thing would be alot easier :-D) So, you want 2.pl to execute 1.pl with a querystring. Piece of cake.

use LWP::Simple;
$escaped_querystring = "something";
$output = get ("http://someurl/cgi-bin/1.pl?$escaped_querystring");
[download]

After this is executed $output will contain whatever 1.pl sent back to the webserver for output, i.e., if it sent back an HTML page, $output will contain the HTML page. You can write 2.pl to construct your querystring to be anything you want, just make sure it's escaped of all the nasty little HTTP characters and such. You can use URI::Escape to do that.

Hope this helps.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer