Greetings again: More trial and error has solved the problem: it began to work again after I created a new local variable to replace $buffer. my $buffer; <<<-----changed $buffer to $bffr [on both lines], and it began working read(STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'}); Of course, I've also made umpteen other changes over the last couple of days, so maybe this variable renaming was just a coincidence. In any case, thanks for the many things I learn from this list. John Echols defender@pianosa.com ==== Want to unsubscribe from this list? ==== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-webcgi-request@macperl.org