Thanks for your help. I think that indeed was my problem with the calls to lynx. However, I have since abandoned that method precisely because of nonportability. The script now looks for LWP, and if it isn't found uses IO::Socket. It works fine for my purposes. Installing the module would be my first choice, but my primary goal is ease of installation. It has to be as easy to install as possible by people who don't know anything about Perl, and have as few files as possible.