How to send a custom http status code with mod_perl

I have written a CGI program and I send a status error with the HTTP header to the client. but when I tried to use mod_perl it only responds with 200 ok status. How can I send a custom status code?

here is the code when I want to respond with the custom status error :

my $cgi      = new CGI;
print $cgi->header(-type=>"text/html", -charset=>'utf-8', -status=>599);

EDIT :
here is the code :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;
use SessionManagement;


my $cgi      = new CGI;
my $method = $cgi->param("method");

my $sessionManagement = new SessionManagement(cgi=>$cgi);
if($sessionManagement){

  if (defined($method)) {
    if($method eq "authentication") {
        loginMethod($cgi,$sessionManagement);
    } elsif ($method eq "someMethod"){
        someMethod($cgi);
    } else{
        print $cgi->header(-type=>"text/xml", -charset=>'utf-8');
        print "<html>method does not exist</html>";
    }

  } else {
      print $cgi->header(-type=>"text/html", -charset=>'utf-8' , -status=>599);
      print "<html>blah blah</html>";
  }

}else{
  print $cgi->header(-type=>"text/html", -charset=>'utf-8' , -status=>599);
  print "<html>blah blah</html>";
}

-------------------------------------------

EDIT 2

giving some more information: when I use curl -v 192.168.1.212/mymodperl/test.pl command in shell.
here is the response :

* About to connect() to 192.168.1.212 port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 192.168.1.212... connected
* Connected to 192.168.1.212 (192.168.1.212) port 80 (#0)
> GET /mymodperl/test.pl HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.15.3 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
> Host: 192.168.1.212
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2017 11:04:18 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat)
< Connection: close
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
< 
<html>hi</html><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>500 Internal Server Error</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Internal Server Error</h1>
<p>The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.</p>
<p>Please contact the server administrator,
 root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.</p>
<p>More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat) Server at 192.168.1.212 Port 80</address>
</body></html>
* Closing connection #0

Solution

From http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=826769, the way to set a status code is

package My::Handler;

use strict;
use warnings 'all';
use Apache2::RequestRec;

sub handler : method {
  my ($class, $r) = @_;

  $r->status( 401 );
  return 401;
}

1;# return true:

EDIT: Clarification

From https://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/user/handlers/intro.html

What are Handlers?

Apache distinguishes between numerous phases for which it provides hooks (because the C functions are called ap_hook_) where modules can plug various callbacks to extend and alter the default behavior of the webserver. mod_perl provides a Perl interface for most of the available hooks, so mod_perl modules writers can change the Apache behavior in Perl. These callbacks are usually referred to as handlers and therefore the configuration directives for the mod_perl handlers look like: PerlFooHandler, where Foo is one of the handler names. For example PerlResponseHandler configures the response callback.

A typical handler is simply a perl package with a handler subroutine. For example:

file:MyApache2/CurrentTime.pm
----------------------------
package MyApache2::CurrentTime;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Apache2::RequestRec ();
use Apache2::RequestIO ();

use Apache2::Const -compile => qw(OK);

sub handler {
  my $r = shift;

  $r->content_type('text/plain');
  $r->print("Now is: " . scalar(localtime) . "\n");

  return Apache2::Const::OK;
}
1;

This handler simply returns the current date and time as a response.

Since this is a response handler, we configure it as a such in httpd.conf:

PerlResponseHandler MyApache2::CurrentTime

Since the response handler should be configured for a specific location, let's write a complete configuration section:

PerlModule MyApache2::CurrentTime
<Location /time>
  SetHandler modperl
  PerlResponseHandler MyApache2::CurrentTime
</Location>

Now when a request is issued to http://localhost/time this response handler is executed and a response that includes the current time is returned to the client.