in reply to Hacker Proofing My First Script

As you are (or should be) only using CGI for parsing the input and generating a redirection header, perhaps you can think of using CGI::Simple instead of CGI. It has the same functionality except for all the HTML-generating stuff, which you do not seem to be using anyhow and which by many is considered to be the weaker point of the CGI-module.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law