As mentioned, LWP is probably much better than what you're trying.. If you want to experiment, you might look at the LWP::UserAgent module.. it is cool because it has great options and you can politely identify yourself. However I found the documentation a bit abstruse.. so below is a quick example that might help..

use LWP;

my $finaldata;
my $query_url = 'http://www.bla.com/';

sub get_pagesum {                                                     
+                        
   my $ua       = LWP::UserAgent->new( agent => 'http://mysite.com/');
+        
   my $response = $ua->get("$query_url",                              
+                        
                              ':content_cb' => \&gen64,               
+                        
                             );                                       
+                        
}                                                                     
+                        
                                                                      
+                        
sub gen64 {                                                           
+                        
   my($data, $response, $protocol) = @_;                              
+                        
   return $finaldata .= $data;                                        
+                        
}

# whatever you got off the last request
# should now be contained in $finaldata
[download]

(In my case I was sending $finaldata off to be md5 checksummed.)

Of course, if your file contains a list of URLs you must fetch, then you'll be carrying out the procedure for each line in the file...