<!DOCTYPE ... is a bit of SGML markup that identifies the language and DTD to which the document belongs. It's required to generate w3c standards-compliant HTML, for example.

If you don't want it, then just issue a manual print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

But I don't get this sysread problem ...if you're trying to get user input, CGI.pm handles that for you transparently. Why else would you be calling sysread on the server side?

HTH

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor