The reason why you get the message is because $var is not defined in test.pl, so you need to explicitly tell Perl which module (package) you want it to look in for $var. The program will work if you define testlib.pl as:
package testlib;
our $var = "Lord only knows if this will work...";
1;
and change the print statement in test.pl to:
print $testlib::var;Now, if you want to do things the recommended way by using a proper module you can do it like this:
# testlib.pm
package testlib;
use strict;
our @EXPORT = qw( $var ); #place all the variables you want to export
+by default in here (c.f. @EXPORT_OK)
use Exporter;
our @ISA = qw(Exporter);
our $var = "Lord only knows if this will work...";
1;
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# test.pl
use strict;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser warningsToBrowser);
use CGI ':standard';
use testlib; # will automagically import $var into current namespace
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $var;
exit;
-imran