Why not help yourself? If your code produces the output you expect on the command line but does not work as a CGI you probably have a permissions problem, provided you remembered to output a header which you did.

You have a die() in there when you try to connect so I suspect your script is dying there. You could easily check this by looking in the server error log, but you will probably find developing CGI code a lot easier if you add this to the very top of your code, just after the shebang line:

# ensure all fatals go to browser during debugging and set-up
# comment this BEGIN block out on production code for security
BEGIN {
    $|=1;
    print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
    use CGI::Carp('fatalsToBrowser');
}

# all the rest of the code goes here
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