You'll want to investigate the LWP modules. example:

use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $request = new HTTP::Request('GET'=>"http://www.google.com" );

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $response = $ua->request($request) || return "ERROR\t$!";

print $response->content_length;
[download]

in return i get:

2927
[download]

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