So I fixed it myself. Thank you for taking the time to offer a suggestion. There were no errors at all.

CGI offers two interface, oo interface  CGI->new ... and functional interface  use CGI qw/ param upload /; ...

If you're trying to use the functional interface, but you fail to import param/upload, your program would have died with

$ perl -MCGI -e " param() "
Undefined subroutine &main::param called at -e line 1.
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So yes, there was definitely a problem