in reply to what does dir after program name mean ?

Well ... it could be anything but more than likely it's just path info:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use CGI; use Data::Dumper; my $cgi = CGI->new(); print $cgi->header, $cgi->start_html( 'Path Info?' ), $cgi->pre( Dumper( $cgi->path_info() ) ), $cgi->end_html;

-derby