Anonymous Monk,
I can't test this because my local proxy/firewall isn't playing nice. You may also want to check out PerlMonks::Mechanized (beta).

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $url = 'http://perlmonks.org';
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck => 1);
$mech->get($url);
$mech->form_number(2);
$mech->field('user' => 'myname');
$mech->field('passwd' => 'password');
$mech->click_button(name => 'login');
my $content = $mech->content();
print $mech->success() ? 'yes' : 'no';
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