All right...look at this piece of code, and please ignore the fact that i could use LWP to do the same thing... 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# collects the daily pic from the nasa web site

$baseurl = "http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/";
$fullurl = "http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html";
$newurl = "";
$status = "";

# get the html source for the page
@source = `lynx -source $fullurl`; 

# scan the source and find the url for the picture
foreach (@source)
  {
    if (m/IMG/i)
      {
        s/<IMG SRC=//i; # strip off the front of the tag
        s/><\/a>//i; # strip off the back of the tag
        s/\"//g; # strip off the double quotes
        $newurl = $baseurl.$_;
        print "retrieving $newurl";
        }
  }

$status = system("lynx -source $newurl > wallpaper.jpg");

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My problem is that the last line creates an empty file every time. I can run the same line from the shell and it retrieves the picture. I wrote another script: 
#!/usr/bin/perl 

$url = "http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0102/iss_sts98a.jpg";

print "retrieving $url";

$status = system ("lynx -source $url > wallpaper.jpg");

[download]
----------------------------------------------------------- just to see whats wrong and it runs fine. What am i doing wrong, and how can i fix it? Thanks in advance.

In reply to system() frustration by Red_King

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