If you check the spec, you'll notice HTTP header lines are terminated by CRLF. Your code checks for only LF. 015 is the octal value for CR, 012 is the octal value for LF. ("\r\n" isn't good cause they're not always CR and LF.)

You can tell you received two CRLF in a row when reading a line at a time by checking for a blank line.

my @headers;
{
   local $/ = "\015\012";
   while (<IN>) {
      chomp;
      last if $_ eq '';
      push(@headers, $_);
   }
}
my $request_line = shift(@headers);
[download]

That handles HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 requests, but I don't know about HTTP/0.9 requests.

Thank you for clarifying this for me. Indeed, it works and works very nicely. I was able to integrate it without any problem. If you would permit me to ask one more related question, I would also like to know how to how to check for the end of HTML content. With your help, I am able read in all of the GET headers. I am still having difficulty reading in the HTML response since it the program doesn't know when it has reached the end of the HTML stream. (I am making a very simple PROXY server). Is there a control character that I can check for at the end of an HTML transfer? Forgive me for asking all of these questions, but I have had a hard time finding any useful documentation on IO::Socket. Thanks for reading this and for your previous help and have a nice day. Joe

To do the fetching side of the proxy, you probably should use LWP. It'll save you from knowing about Content-Length, for starters (and therein lies the answer to your question). Search for that in the spec I linked earlier.