I just figured this out yesterday for something I'm doing....

my $cgi = new CGI ();
my $cookie = $cgi -> cookie ( "WHATEVER" );
if ( defined $cookie ) {
#cookie is there and do with it what you want, we'll print it:
$cgi -> cookie ( "WHATEVER" );
}
else {
# Make a cookie        
my $cookie = $cgi -> cookie ( 
            -name => "WHATEVER",
            -value => "WHATEVER" );
        print $cgi -> header ( -type => "text/html", -cookie
        => $cookie );
}
[download]

Something like that....you'll have to mess with it. I got all my learning about this from O'Reilly's CGI programming With Perl.

Good luck