My question is how do I get LWP useragent to act like a browser and find the default page in a directory?

It has nothing to do with your browser, and everything to do with your web server. I tested your example on a site I had control of (running apache). Here's what happened:
[jon@valium jon]$ telnet divisionbyzero.com 80 Trying 168.103.109.84... Connected to divisionbyzero.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET /decss HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 02:47:50 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.5 OpenSSL/0. +9.6b mod_perl/1.24_01 Location: http://www.divisionbyzero.com/decss/ Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>301 Moved Permanently</TITLE> </HEAD><BODY> <H1>Moved Permanently</H1> The document has moved <A HREF="http://www.divisionbyzero.com/decss/"> +here</A>.<P> <HR> <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.22 Server at www.divisionbyzero.com Port 80</ADDRE +SS> </BODY></HTML> Connection closed by foreign host.
The web server sent me a 301 since /decss wasn't an actual file, but rather, a directory. My web browser followed that redirect automatically, which is what browsers are supposed to do when the http method used is GET or HEAD. I suspect your troubles are caused because you are using the POST method, which is explicitly forbidden to redirect you without notifying the user.

BlueLines

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In reply to Re: Checking "incomplete" URLs by BlueLines
in thread Checking "incomplete" URLs by nop

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