Brother, thanks for your patience...this was exactly what was happening. Slowly but surely, I'll get all this figured out.

$PM = "Perl Monks'";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;

From perlfaq8:

What's wrong with using backticks in a void context?

Strictly speaking, nothing. Stylistically speaking, it's not a good way to write maintainable code because backticks have a (potentially humongous) return value, and you're ignoring it. It's may also not be very efficient, because you have to read in all the lines of output, allocate memory for them, and then throw it away.

Note that backticks return whatever the program that's run with them sends to STDOUT. Considering that you're redirecting STDOUT to a file here, you're probably better off using system.

More food for thought...thanks. I will definitely read up on these funky functions.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar;
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;

Maybe I will when I figure out how the LWP module works. Being new to this, I'm not so interested in the best or most correct solution as I am in getting the damn thing to work in the first place. :-)

But thanks for the advice.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar;
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;

For plain GET calls, you can use LWP::Simple (if you dont need any specific referer, or cookie stuff)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
my $result = get(http://www.perlmonks.com/index.pl?node_id=131");
[download]

With POST you'll need

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::URL;

my $WWWAgent = new LWP::UserAgent();
my $url=new URI::URL 'http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl';
$url->query_form(node_id => "131");
my $WWWRequest = new HTTP::Request 'POST', $url->as_string() ;
my $WWWResult = $WWWAgent->request($WWWRequest);
die "Error logging in $WWWResult->code $WWWResult->message" if(!$WWWRe
+sult->is_success);
print $WWWResult->content;
[download]

Greetz
Beatnik
... Quidquid perl dictum sit, altum viditur.