Please replace:

        my $socket = new IO::Socket::INET (
                peerAddr => $target,
                peerPort => '80',
                Proto => 'tcp',
                Timeout => $timeout,);
        die "Socket failed at $target\n" unless $socket;

        print $socket "GET http://$target/~$users[$i] HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n
+";
        my @source = <$socket>;
[download]

with:

  use LWP::Simple;
  my $source = get "http://$target/~$users[$i]";
[download]

No sense in trying to reinvent code that has been done, done again, done over, redone, and finally made fast.

Oh, and then you won't need to check return statuses... you'll either have the content, or undef. So the rest of your code also becomes simpler.

Right tool for the job.