Here's one I hacked up a while back when faced with a similar (distribution-only) constraint. I had the particular problem of often needing to see only the response header. Hence the -h option. It isn't foolproof, but it gets the job done. 
#!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe
# get.pl -- Make an HTTP GET request and report the results
#
# Dave Smith, 6/15/00

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $get_or_head = "GET";

my $headeronly = 0;
if ( $ARGV[0] eq "-h" ) {
    $headeronly = 1;
    $get_or_head = "HEAD";
    shift;
}

my $url = shift or usage();
my ($host,$uri) = $url =~ m#^(?:http://|//|)([^/]*)/?(.*)$#;
# print "host=$host uri=$uri\n";
usage() if not $host;


my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $host,
                                 PeerPort => 'http(80)',
                                 Proto    => 'tcp');
die "Couldn't open socket to $host" if not $sock;
print $sock "$get_or_head /$uri HTTP/1.0\r\n",
            "Accept: text/plain, text/html, text/xml, image/gif\r\n",
            # "If-modified-since: Sat, 14 Jul 2000 01:51:07 GMT\r\n",
            "Host: foo.com\r\n",
            "\r\n";

while ( <$sock> ) {
    s/\r//;
    last if $headeronly and /^$/;
    print;
}


sub usage {
print <<"END";
usage:
    $0 [-h] fully-qualified-URL

        -h response header only
END

    exit(0);
}

In reply to Re: Grabbing a web page without LWP or the like by dws
in thread Grabbing a web page without LWP or the like by Hot Pastrami

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