hangs on $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}

My apologies in advance if this is something that's been described &
solved before... I can't seem to find the answer in archival searches
(maybe I'm just using the wrong terms).

At any rate, I have a fairly large script that I wrote when operating
under Apache 1.3, perl 5.8.0, Redhat 7.3.  I'm now running Apache 2.0,
perl 5.8.0, and Redhat 8.0... and it stopped working when I performed
the upgrade.

 
Anywhere, what's happening is that the code below this paragraph is just
hanging...(on the second line, I've inserted a few "print
'debug<BR>\n';" lines in the real thing to make sure.) it does finally
time out, without producing any output.

here's the relevant code:

$pass = "/cgi-bin/plaintextresult.cgi?$ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}";

print "<TD WIDTH='33%' ALIGN='CENTER' BGCOLOR='#222222'><A
HREF=\"$pass\" target='printerfriendly'>Plain text version</A></TD>\n";
          


Thanks in advance, and again, sorry if this is a FAQ, I just couldn't
find the answer anywhere.

-Mike Forbes
mforbes@xxxxxxxxxx