You don't say why you "can not use LWP", but if you're going to purposely cripple yourself then you need to at least be reading the correct documentation as (IO::)Socket is only a small part of the picture.

To fill in the rest, you need to read RFCs 2617, 2616, and perhaps even 1945.

    --k.

Thanks for the pointer Kanji, I eventually figured out that my request needed a line like:
Authorization: Basic foobar

For the posterity of future monks, my final code looks like this:


snip


  my $userPass = base64("user:password");
    
    # Need two \n in the get request
    my $get =<<EOF;
GET $path HTTP/1.0
Authorization: Basic $userPass

EOF
    # Open the socket
    my $http_request = IO::Socket::INET->new(
                                             Proto    => "tcp", 
                                             PeerAddr => $host,
                                             PeerPort => $port,
                                             ) or return $!;

    print $http_request $get;  # Write the request

    my $webPage;
    { 
        # Grab the output
        local($/) = undef;
        $webPage = <$http_request>;
    }

    return $webPage;
[download]


snip

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(
    keep_alive  =>  1
);
my $request = new HTTP::Request GET => "http://www.perlmonks.org";
$request->authorization_basic("username", "password");
my $response = $ua->request($request);
if ($response->is_success) {
    print STDOUT $response->content;
} else {
    print STDERR "Error retrieving page!\n";
};
[download]

This combination, not only allows you to authenticate against the web server that you are retrieving the web page from, but you can also make use of proxy network configurations and exert greater control over the request and subsequent response.

perl -e 's&&rob@cowsnet.com.au&&&split/[@.]/&&s&.com.&_&&&print'