furtive is wrong there with the "system" answer. System doesn't return data. vroom was advocating the use of backticks with lynx. Placing a shell command in them nets you the standard out of the shell.

#try these and see under un*x
my $s='%Y';
print "date $s", $/;
print 'date $s', $/;
print `date $s`, $/;
print system("date $s"), $/;
##
## Thus [vroom]'s code should be
##

$webpage=`lynx -source http://blah.com`;  #gets html source of documen
+t
$webpage=`lynx -dump http://blah.com`;    #returns output as formatted
+ text
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