Please wrap your code in <code> tags, otherwise it comes out as an unintelligible mess.

I think what your trying to do is similar to the below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

eval 'exec perl -w -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
    if 0; # not running under some shell

require 5;
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::URL;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent("ExciteMespGrabber/1.0 " . $ua->agent);

$ua->env_proxy;

my $uri;

$uri = new URI::URL "http://www.excite.co.uk/";

my $req = new HTTP::Request GET => $uri->as_string;

my $res = $ua->request($req);

if (!$res->is_success) {
    die "Fetch failed\n";
}

my $content = $res->content;

if ($content =~ /<!--\s+ExciteMesp{(\S+)}\s+-->/) {
    print "Check ok for: $1\n";
} elsif ( $content ) {
    print "MESP ok, but contains no monitoring comment\n";
} else {
    print "Check failed!\n";
}
[download]

Feel free to tell me if you find this helpful.... or if i was completely off the mark ;-)