I suspect that had you done the rewrite using CGI you would have been done sooner than you were staying with the broken hand-rolled approach.

And you wouldn't have taken up anyone else's time.

That is why people chant CGI. It is the good kind of lazy. Takes less work and you come up with answers that you know you can trust.

The only case where I wouldn't recommend it that I know of is doing .csv downloads to IE 4.x (may be some OS or subversion issue as well there). Why? Because if the browser thinks it is a CGI script, it breaks horribly in loading Excel. (In fact it takes the path, that includes the directory "Temporary Internet Files", splits on the space, and feeds that as 3 files to Excel, none of which are there.)

In that case I would cheat and store the argument list in $ENV{PATH_INFO}.

Other than that bug I have not ever heard of any good reason to not do things right with CGI...