It should be clear why you can't replicate the CGI behavior from the command-line; the normal way of getting to form B is to submit an HTML form to a webserver, but there's no webserving and no submitting going on from the command line. One way of getting to form B is to give the script input that looks like it came from form A, and this is possible because CGI.pm can process arguments from the command line.

./myscript.pl foo=bar baz=bletch
[download]

will act just like

http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?foo=bar&baz=bletch
[download]

So you might look into that (I think you can even save a CGI object to a file, which would replicate the form variables; you could then read in those variables on the command line with ./myscript.pl < savefile. I'll admit to not knowing *much* about that, though.

As an aside: you don't *need* the debugger to track down the errors. Just sprinkle some print statements into your CGI routines to help you track the changes to the variables over time, that will help you localize the errors.

HTH

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