Second question today, please nobody shoot me!

I have a subroutine that fetches a URL and saves it to the named file. I use LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request. As you can see from the code, the subroutine tries three times to fetch the URL (sleeping for 5 seconds between fetches) and if all three fail, returns 0. (Leaving the caller to handle appropriately).

My question though is: Is there a better way to do this?
use strict; use LWP::UserAgent; ################################################################# # Returns the success of storing $url into newly created $output sub get_page { my( $url, $output ) = @_; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; $ua->agent( "$0/0.5 " . $ua->agent); $ua->timeout( 30 ); my $req = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $url ); $req->header( 'Accept' => 'text/html, image/gif' ); for( my $i = 1; $i <= 3; $i++ ) { # Send the request my $res = $ua->request( $req ); if( $res->is_success ) { open( OUT, ">$output" ) or die "Couldn't open $output: $!"; print OUT $res->content; close( OUT ) or die "Couldn't close $output: $!"; return 1; } else { print "Couldn't get $url on $i/3\n"; print "Sleeping 5 seconds...\n"; sleep 5; print "Gonna try again...\n"; } } return 0; }

In reply to How can I do this better? by spaz

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