In the future, Alex, you might want to think about putting a

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
[download]

in your code. This will cause all error messages to be prefixed with the text necessary for them to display on Web browsers. Even if you don't use any of CGI's functions, this is solely for ease of debugging.

If you have access to the error logs of web server, look at them; they will contain the error that Perl spewed out:

(Mon Feb 26 17:52:05 2001) (error) (client 10.0.1.2) (Mon Feb 26 17:52:05 2001) bad.cgi: Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name at bad.cgi line 6.
(Mon Feb 26 17:52:05 2001) (error) (client 10.0.1.2) (Mon Feb 26 17:52:05 2001) bad.cgi: Execution of bad.cgi aborted due to compilation errors. </small