print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w


# NEEDED Variables
$basedir = "/home/**/**";
$linkscgi = "http://www.foo.cgi";

# use form to get the data
use CGI qw(:standard);
$query = new CGI;
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Ah-ha!

You are using "perl -w", which is good; But you are failing to listen to the warnings I believe. If you run it, you will see that you get a warning

Name "main::basedir" used only once: possible typo at ./index.pl line 
+5.
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A simple perl -c index.pl would have turned up this warning as well.

updated Removed incorrect information regarding warnings and STDOUT

Warnings are printed to STDERR, and so they don't get outputted to the browser (with most UNIX / Webserver combos)...

Thanks to ChemBoy for noting that IRIX + Netscape Server does send warnings to the browser)

[ ar0n ]

To avoid "use of unintialized value" errors, I had to add some lines to check for NULL occurances of the form variables (and $TRACKER - which gave a NULL value from the command line{???}):

$TRACKER = $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'};
if (!($TRACKER)) { $TRACKER = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};}
#added
if (!($TRACKER)) { $TRACKER = ""; }

# why would these ENV variables BOTH be blank ???

$client_email = $query->param('email');
#added
if (!($client_email)) { $client_email=""; }
chomp($client_email);

#added to other query vars...
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This seems somewhat redundant, BUT... those first few variables were happening BEFORE I sent the headers.

is there a better way to assure that the form values that are needed are not NULL before proceeding?