...do not despair Lori713 in the face of this discouraging (and somewhat misguided) advice.

It is not useful to conclude, "He drives without a seatbelt, therefore he must be a terrible and careless driver." And it is similarly unhelpful to conclude (without seeing any code) that the code is worthless and unmaintainable on the basis of a few superficial points of dogma.

Don't get me wrong. I think that everyone learning or writing their own code from scratch should make a point of using strict and -w for everything they create. But my experience with production projects is that you should not feel stopped from proceeding if you cannot retrofit those civilities onto an existing code base. There are more important tests that you can conduct.

But go ahead guys. Keep on declaring any code that does not meet your personal standards for cleanliness or elegance to be "worthless" and watch the number of IT managers who refuse to let Perl anywhere near their shop grow. (It's already a depressingly large number of them already.) The cliche' of a consultant who leaves behind a legacy of ugly and maintainable code is a pervasive one. And part of that legend is created by weak and dogmatic programmers who know how to write things from scratch, but quiver in the face of complex code written by someone else whose thought process works differently.

And there's good reason for this. It's easier to pronounce code to be "worthless" than it is to admit, "I don't understand how this works."

So don't be discouraged Lori. And as other advice here indicates, you should simply take small parts of the problem and examine them one at a time. As you work with the system, you'll begin to see what it does, and what you can do with it in the future.

You've already identified several things that are important about your Perl parts of the problem. Use the seatbelt where you are creating new things by using -w and strict in your own code. Learn how to test your code from the command-line.

In addition, begin now to learn how your web server operates. Become familiar with the configuration files (or other configuration systems) and with the log files that are created. Sometimes those log files are going to contain the clues about what went wrong with your system.

Most of all relax. What you have to do can be done (in fact, you will do it) and you have already taken an important step by joining this community and becoming part of the conversation.

...All the world looks like -well- all the world, when your hammer is Perl.
---v