A little more on this than others posted might be handy. Do you tend to use the OOP style when calling the class methods in CGI. By that, I mean, do you call them like @p=$query->param() or do you tend to use the imported commands like @p=param()? If you tend to call only the methods by class then you may want to do a use CGI (); to tell perl not to import anything into your space. Sending it an empty list like that is a nice trick if you play the honest OOP game.

OTOH if you like the handy-dandy HTML helpers and like them imported or if you want the code methods imported as well you can get CGI to give you just the ones you want.

Commonly used requests that I've seen are:

## remember, only one.
use CGI; # let it do it's own thing.
use CGI (); # import NOTHING, thank you.
use CGI qw(param redirect); # just param() and redirect()
use CGI qw(:cgi); # just cgi stuff
use CGI ':html'; # all the HTML[23] and netscape stuff
use CGI qw/:html :form/; # all html + form html widgets
use CGI ':standard'; # all cgi and HTML[23] and forms
use CGI ':all'; # kitchen sink
[download]

I tend not to use the qw operator on a single item, but you may get into the habit of doing so if you tend to add things one at a time while building code. Not a bad habit but I personally think it is ugly =)

HTH

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)