as was said above, it is almost certainly a server misconfiguration. the server needs to know what to do with the thing you're requesting (execute it or show it). if your web server isn't setup correctly, it will not execute the perl script, and will assume it to be "just another text file", thus returning the code of the perl script. since you're on a windows box, try mucking around in the "file associations" config screen, since the problem you're having is probably that the file extension of your scripts is not setup as a "Perl Script that should be executed" in the server. --- if all you need is a server to do static HTML/CGI stuff for testing purposes only, i recomend Sambar (http://www.sambar.com/). it's free, supports CGI, and is incredibly easy to setup/use.