It is very simple to get a protected page using LWP::UserAgent. A little example:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Cookies;

# setup your browser
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(keep_alive => 1, timeout => 300);

# what kind of browser you are
$ua->agent("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/200
+21207 Phoenix/0.5");

# a place to store cookies, if needed
$ua->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies->new(file => "perlcookies.dat", autosav
+e => 1) );

# now build a request
$request = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $url );

# set credentials
$request->authorization_basic($username, $password);

# run browser
$response = $ua->request($request);

# and check response
if ($response->is_success) {
  print $response->content, "\n";
} else {
  die "failed: ", $response->message, "\n";
}
[download]

Happy downloading :) Valerio