You do realize that when you run a perl script from a shell (ie from the command line) you will not get all of those standard CGI environment variables... It is the web server that sets those environment variables right before it executes the CGI script. When testing scripts from the command line you need to set those variables yourself, or use a module that can simulate a CGI environment like HTTP::Request::AsCGI
The fact that your TERM environment variable is set to xterm gives it away that you ran this from the shell.
