I tried adding the sleep command and your approach worked flawlessly! I was able to single step through my CGI program and see the output get rendered a piece at a time in the web browswer.

I should also mention that I figured out which TTY device to use running the tty command. In my case, this was pts/0. To open up the permissions on this tty I used chmod 777 /dev/pts/0, and in the cgi program the corresponding line is
$ENV{PERLDB_OPTS} = 'TTY=/dev/pts/0';

Using the text-based perl debugger reminded me why I like ptkdb so much! The ptkdb GUI is very intuitive, and I really have to struggle to do simple things in the text-mode debugger. This seems strange to me, since I normally don't have problems with text-based tools. I normally get bored with GUIs quickly and seek a text-based solution.

Even so, this is a valuable technique, especially for working across firewalls. I wonder if I could also somehow use ssh?

Thanks tye!

Update:Changed to a better way of determining which tty to use.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma