I am a beginner to perl but have come across a problem. I would like to pass variables back to the same script without putting them in hidden fields. Is this possible. The code I tried is below - can anyone advise me?

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
##########################

use CGI qw (:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

$q = new CGI;
print $q->header;

$action=$q->param(action);

print $q->start_html(
    -TITLE=>'test,'
    -BGCOLOR=>'#FFFFFF');
print $q->startform('post', 'test.cgi');

print "$action";
$q->param(action,'to_be_passed_back');
$action=$q->param(action);
print "$action";
print $q->submit(-name=>'submit', -value=>'submit');
print $q->endform;
print $q->end_html;
[download]

Thanks P