Yeah, that was the next problem. At first I was using the backticks, but the problem was that the utility script took 20 or so minutes to run, and the backtick operator only returns after the child process has stopped running, so the operation timed out from the browser. I of course was using a nohup to keep the utility script running on the server, but the end user would see it as an error...

I implemented the open method after that, and it works beautifully :)

Final, working code (minus sensitive info):

...........................

#!/opt/perl5/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;

# set path, instead of putting it in the open statement
$ENV{'PATH'} = "/usr/bin:/opt/perl5/bin/:";

#location of product_gen.pl, plus arguments
my $gen_script = "/path/to/server/product_gen.pl -prfv";

# Create a new CGI object
my $cgi = new CGI;

# Output HTML header to browser
print $cgi->header('text/html');

print qq{<h4>script executing</h4>};

open(PRODUCT_GEN, "nohup perl $gen_script |") or die "Error: $!\n";

while (<PRODUCT_GEN>)
{
  print $_, "<br>";
}

close(PRODUCT_GEN);
[download]

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Thanks again for all the assistance!

  higle