you could provide us more information about what kind of error occured... you can find that in the logs of your web server.

does your CGI program work as expected ? when run like http://localhost/cgi-bin/das_counter.pl?ilikepie do you get anything in $ENV{QUERY_STRING} ?

assuming you're using Apache, you should try something like this:

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/das_counter.pl?ilikepie" -->
[download]

"if you need to pass additional arguments to a CGI program, using the query string, this cannot be done with exec cgi, but can be done with include virtual" ( Apache mod_include )

also, you'd better be using the CGI module so you don't have to mess around with (low-level) stuff like processing the QUERY_STRING.

:)))))