That's odd. When I wrote my first CGI script using CGI I copy and pasted the synopsis sample, edited it a little and it worked straight off. It may be because the first couple of "interesting" lines in the sample are:

  use CGI qw/:standard/;
  print header,
[download]

which, without reading the comprehensive documentation, DWIM. Hey, maybe some of this CPAN documentation isn't so bad after all. ;)