I am not sure if you mean use Perl to pull stuff from other servers:

use LWP::Simple 'getstore';
my $url = 'http://some.domain.com/image.gif';
my $file = '/tmp/image.gif';
getstore( $url, $file );
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or if you mean do the opposite of a file upload, ie use a CGI script to control the downloading of certain images. If you don't want control you would just make them browsable. Anyway if you do a Super Search for 'CGI file download filename' in the text you will turn up all the info you need including:

Web Initiated File Download
File Download
CGI File Download

Incidentally when you open a file using >> you are opening it in APPEND mode, ie if it exists you add to the end of it. You almost certainly want > Also check the return value of the open and apply binmode as in:

open F, ">$file" or die "Could not write $file Perl says reason $!\n";
binmode F;   # may be important does no harm it not needed
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As tachyon and atcroft pointed out, you can use LWP::Simple. However I have a situation where I have to send cookie along with the request. In that case, LWP::Simple does not help any more, and I use LWP::UserAgent:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
    my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => "http://blah.com/attachmen
+t.php?attachmentid=123");
    $request->header("Cookie", 'a=1; b=2; c=3');
    my $content = $ua->request($request)->content();
    open(FILE, ">", "foo.jpg");
    binmode(FILE);    
    print FILE $content;
    close FILE;
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Look at LWP::Simple's getstore() function. To quote the documentation,

getstore($url, $file) Gets a document identified by a URL and stores it in the file. The return value is the HTTP response code.

Hope that helps.

My first idea was to use LWP::* but when I think about it, I don't think that's what the module was used for.

Dave.

Disposition headers are very important when doing this. You can force the file to open in different ways. In this example, I'm forcing PPT to open the file in PPT outside of the browser and in slideshow mode. (If I recall correctly - it's a while since I looked at this system in action.)

Obviously you'll write a much more elegant file-request-to-filename converter than the trash I've included here for this example.

$presentation_1 = "./mypath/my_file_1";
$presentation_2 = "./mypath/my_file_2";
$presentation_3 = "./mypath/my_file_3";
$download_filetype = ".pps";

#get_and_process_form;
my $query = new CGI;
@form_field_names = $query->param;
foreach $field (@form_field_names) {
        $form_values{$field} = $query->param($field);
}

$request = $form_values{'report'};

if ($request eq "aaaa") {$presentation = $presentation_1;}
elsif ($request eq "bbbb") {$presentation = $presentation_2;}
else {$presentation = $presentation_3;}

open(FILE, $presentation) or dienice("cannot open file $presentation :
+ $_[0] $!");
@LINES = <FILE>;
close(FILE);

$filename = join('_', $form_values{'report'}, $form_values{'language'}
+, $form_values{'year'});
$filename = join('', $filename, $download_filetype);

print "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-powerpoint\n";
print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename\n\n";

for $i (0..$#LINES) {
    print $LINES[$i];
}
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Use the right tool for the job...if your needs are simple, just use wget or curl. These tools handle a lot of the cases that your code may or may not handle already, and they are robust, tested, etc.

Not to discourage you from rolling your own, but for a simple task, I recommend tools that work already.