Or you can process the document as it arrives (second $ua->request() argument is a code reference): use LWP::UserAgent; $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; $URL = 'ftp://ftp.unit.no/pub/rfc/rfc-index.txt'; my $expected_length; my $bytes_received = 0; my $res = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $URL), sub { my($chunk, $res) = @_; $bytes_received += length($chunk); unless (defined $expected_length) { $expected_length = $res->content_length || 0; } if ($expected_length) { printf STDERR "%d%% - ", 100 * $bytes_received / $expected_length; } print STDERR "$bytes_received bytes received\n"; # XXX Should really do something with the chunk itself # print $chunk; }); print $res->status_line, "\n"; #### The subroutine variant requires a reference to callback routine as the second argument to the request method and it can also take an optional chuck size as the third argu- ment. This variant can be used to construct "pipe-lined" processing, where processing of received chuncks can begin before the complete data has arrived. The callback func- tion is called with 3 arguments: the data received this time, a reference to the response object and a reference to the protocol object. The response object returned from the request method will have empty content. If the request fails, then the the callback routine is not called, and the response->content might not be empty. The request can be aborted by calling die() in the call- back routine. The die message will be available as the "X-Died" special response header field.