That was my first thought, but breaking the URL into host and URI didn't solve the issue. If I figure anything else out, I'll post it here.

Update: sutch seems to have hit the nail on the head. If you send "GET /authenticate.cgi HTTP/1.0" alone it errors out. The key is attaching "Host: login.gatorlink.ufl.edu" to the end of the request, before your $BLANK variable.

while(my $url = shift @ARGV) {
    unless($url =~ m{^http://([A-Za-z0-9\.\-]+)/(.*)$}) {
        print "$0: invalid url: $url\n";
        next;
    }

    my($host, $uri) = ($1, $2);
    my $remote = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto => "tcp",
                                       PeerAddr => $host,
                                       PeerPort => "http(80)");

    unless ($remote) { 
        die "Cannot connect to http daemon on $host\n"
    }

    $remote->autoflush(1);
    print $remote "GET /$uri HTTP/1.0\nHost: $host" . $BLANK;
    print while(<$remote>);
    print "\n$sep";
    close $remote;
}
[download]

Your end result might look something like that. You really should just use LWP. =)

'kaboo