You had a lot of Perl solutions, so it's time for a non-perl one :-) you could spawn a call to the program wget via a system call: wget is available for Windows and a lot of UNIXes and provides a nice progress indicator for the download, that is suitable to be tailed on a UNIX console, and hence can easily go on a web page.

Watch out for output buffering!

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz