Well, in that case, if you have to put up with 2000 lines, I can put up with these few. :)

## Implicit: htmDir no longer ends in a slash

use strict; ## Yay!!

sub updateTiles() {

  my $tilefile = "$htmDir/tile.htm";

  open(TILE, "$tilefile") or die "Could not open $tilefile: $!\n";
  my $tileinfo; { local $/; $tileinfo = <TILE>; }

  my $section;

  for $section (qw(Tile Pile Link)) {

    my $contentTemp = $query->param($section);

    ## Clean up, aisle seven
    $contentTemp =~ y/A-Za-z0-9_\n//cd;

    if ($section eq "Pile") {
      $contentTemp =~ s#\n#<P></P>#g;
    }

    elsif ($section eq "Link") {
      my $searchterm = $contentTemp;

      ## Even stricter here:
      $searchterm =~ y/a-z//cd;

      $contentTemp =
      qq{<IMG SRC="images/enter.gif" WIDTH="8" HEIGHT="12">}.
      qq{<A HREF="cgi-bin/show.cgi?action=showTiles&tileType=Search}.
      qq{&searchFor=$searchterm">View this month's tiles.</A>};

    }
    ## Ugh...I am not going to touch this.
    $tileinfo =~ s/<!--$section-->(.*)/<!--$section-->$contentTemp/;
  }

  ## Should probably write a new file and copy/rename but:
  ## File locking anyone? :)
  open(HOME,">$tilefile") or die "Could not write $tilefile: $!\n";
  print HOME $tileinfo;
  close(HOME);

  my $image = $query->param('Image');
  if ($image =~ /^[A-Z0-9_]$/i) {
    my $newFile = &fileUpload('Image',250000,1,'latest_image',
                              'JPEG','.jpg','.jpeg');
  }
}
[download]

Update: Thanks to merlyn for the catch with the brackets. Now fixed. $Deity help the rest of the 2000 lines however.