Well, a quick typing of
perldoc CGI reveals a pretty
direct answer without waiting for a fellow monk to go fetch
the book and read it to you...
DEBUGGING
If you are running the script from the command line or in
the perl debugger, you can pass the script a list of key-
words or parameter=value pairs on the command line or from
standard input (you don't have to worry about tricking
your script into reading from environment variables). You
can pass keywords like this:
your_script.pl keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
or this:
your_script.pl keyword1+keyword2+keyword3
or this:
your_script.pl name1=value1 name2=value2
or this:
your_script.pl name1=value1&name2=value2
To turn off this feature, use the -no_debug pragma.
To test the POST method, you may enable full debugging
with the -debug pragma. This will allow you to feed new-
line-delimited name=value pairs to the script on standard
input.
When debugging, you can use quotes and backslashes to
escape characters in the familiar shell manner, letting
you place spaces and other funny characters in your param-
eter=value pairs:
your_script.pl "name1='I am a long value'" "name2=two\ words
+"