You want to use something like LWP::Simple for this.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -wT
use CGI qw(:standard :html3);
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;

my $locat = "http://www.nsn.org/elghome/material_office2.html";

# note that there is no better diagnostic info from get()
my $html = get( $locat ) or die "Could not read data from $locat"; 

print header,
    start_html,
    $html,
    end_html;
[download]

However, using this version of get() means you will not be able to check the response codes or headers, if necessary. $html will simply be undef on failure. If you still have troubles, read the LWP::Simple docs for how resolve this issue (&get_print, for example, gives you response codes that you can check, but it clearly has the side-effect of directly printing the data).

Cheers,
Ovid

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