I'm not sure why you need to 'reverse engineer' legacy Perl code (decipher, maybe ;^), but your right in thinking there's a better way ... well, simpler anyway.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common qw/ GET /;

my $url      = shift;

my $browser  = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $browser->request( GET $url );

print $response->code;
[download]

Personally, I think $response->is_success would be more beneficial as 200 isn't the only response indicating success, but that's your call...

One caveat, tho:- test against a known good site before anything else ... LWP::UserAgent returns a 500 error instead of undef if you don't have have the modules necessary to talk to SSL (aka https) servers.

    --k.