LWP comes with a nifty stand alone program called GET. GET is a script that uses the LWP modules to fetch remote web pages. The following worked for me:

% GET -Sd http://www.slashdot.org
GET http://www.slashdot.org --> 301 Moved Permanently
GET http://slashdot.org/ --> 200 OK
[download]

Which shows www.slashdot.org being redirected to slashdot.org. This works fine if you just want to run a few URLs by hand. If you want to automate this functionality in a script, you can always peek under the covers of GET and emulate what its doing.

-Blake