in reply to Debugging without shell access?

One minor point, not related to your problem, that caught my eye: I think EOF is not the best choice for a heredoc terminator. I would recommend something like END_HTML. Also, using quotes around the terminator may help the reader, even if the default behavior without the quotes is what you need. Cheers. 
print <<"END_HTML";
<html>
<head>
<title>Masking Private Data</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Masking Private Data</h2>
This script is masking private data in the test data set with a
departure date before $preserve_date.  Records related
to later events are being preserved.<p>
</body>
</html>
END_HTML

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