If you want a method that utilizes cookies that doesn't use any perl modules (although I recommend using modules), you can use this:

sub cookieRead {
    local(@rawCookies) = split (/; /,$ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'});

    foreach (@rawCookies) {
        ($key, $val) = split (/=/, $_);
        $cookie{$key} = $val;
    }
}
sub cookieWrite {
    local($name, $value, $expiration, $path, $domain, $secure) = @_;

    print "Set-Cookie: ";
    print ($name, "=", $value, "; path=", $path, "; domain=", $domain,
+ "; ", $secure, "\n");
}
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Here is the code I use to write cookie information:

&cookieWrite("session", "$userName::$Password", "$expDate", "/cgi-bin/
+", "fittrend.com");
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Here is the code I use to read cookie information

&cookieRead;
($cookie{'user'}, $cookie{'pass'}) = split (/::/, $cookie{'session'});

&loadUserSession($cookie{'user'});
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a couple of things to point out:

1. If the user name or password contains a :: then this code could potentially break.

2. I recommend that you encrypt this information for security reasons. Using Crypt or another modules on cpan. Lastly, if you have a large amount of data, it won't fit on a single variable in the cookie. I just needed mine to track user name and password so I can use other code to load the entire user's profile from a MySQL back-end.

At the time, I was having problems with multiple variables in a cookie, so I simply delimited it. If I spent more time on it, I'd probably fix it.

Hope this helps
-Marc