I, too, must advocate the use of Apache::Session. According to a history of the module I read, it has little to do with Apache or Sessions itself and is called "Apache::Session" purely for historical reasons.

Apache::Session is the underlying framework to implement your own session system. It's basically an interface to an object store. You tie a hash to, lets say Apache::Session::DBI, use your hash as you like, then when you come back with an id of some sort (from a cookie perhaps, or a session url like http://example.com/session/3F48dfj12578w), your hash will be restored.

The nice thing is that storage methods for files and numerous databases are available. Check out the perldoc on it for some examples. As one who rolled his own session management system before discovering this, I highly recommend using this before reinventing another wheel. =)

-Ducky