If all you're after is retrieving pages from the web, there are many other alternatives :

LWP::Simple

As long as you need only one page, it's hard to beat LWP::Simple :

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

my $url = 'http://www.google.com';

mirror($url,'f:/test.html');
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WWW::Mechanize

If you need something that feels more like a browser, it's hard to surpass WWW::Mechanize, as it has "open" and "click" methods that take link names or link numbers as arguments :

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $url = 'http://www.google.com';

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$agent->get($url);
$agent->open('Images');

print $agent->content();
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If your path through the pages is more complex, my module WWW::Mechanize::Shell can help you with the development of your WWW::Mechanize script.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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I think you meant follow(), open() is not a valid WWW::Mechanize method, at least not in the publically available versions.

   use strict;
   use LWP::Simple qw/getstore/;

   my $site      = getstore('http://www.google.com',
                            'test.html');
   # Or you could store the content in a scalar, with: 
   # my $content = get('http://www.google.com');
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But you also mentioned you wanted images, so you'll want to look into using HTML::SimpleLinkExtor as well, which is used thusly:

   use strict;
   use HTML::SimpleLinkExtor;

   my $extract = HTML::SimpleLinkExtor->new();
   $extract->parse_file("test.html");
   # or you could use $extract->parse($content), as shown
   # above, using the raw HTML
   my @images = $extract->img;

   # feed each element of @images back to a getstore() for
   # each image found
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If you want to maintain "browsability" of the site when you're done fetching it locally, you'll want to look into rewriting the links found in the document. I would suggest using URI to get the absolute url of the links, fetch those, and save them locally to disk. If you want to maintain the same filenames as referenced in the main HTML page you fetched, you might want to either regex off the filename portion itself, from the link you get, or use File::Basename to chop it off programatically. Here's a regex that can help split the file from the URL you get with URI's new_abs() method:

    $file =~ s/.*[\/\\](.*)/$1/;
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Why would you want to use these modules instead of OLE? Because they're portable, and if your code happens to move from Windows to Linux or BSD or some other non-OLE-supporting variant, it will still continue to work, without you having to rewrite it.

Good luck in your quest.