One problem with wget (as I have noticed, but maybe I'm doing something wrong ...) is that it somehow doesn't return the right pid to perl, even if you use wget -b

So what I did once was to start wget and then look directly into the process table to find the right pid. Although I was doing this for exactly the opposit reason (I wanted to print a "still downloading" message to the client) it worked quite well.

Anyway, if you found out the PID, you could then use a SIG{ALRM} to issue a kill $PID after 60 seconds

And BTW, I don't think using LWP is the ultimate best solution for downloading stuff. If you want to download not only one page, but a grab a bunch of pages (via spidering, e.g.) wget is definitly easier than LWP. If you use the -p option, wget automatically downloads all additional files needed to render the page, i.e. external style sheets, images, javascript etc. Very handy..

--
#!/usr/bin/perl -w just another perl hacker
print+seek(DATA,$=*.3,@-)?~~<DATA>:$:__DATA__