Perhaps you should try to use LWP::Simple instead... it will indeed work almost as your made up example. It won't tell you the content-type... but do you really need it? I rarely do.

Use:

• get to retrieve the contents of a URL into a variable
• getprint to print the contents of URL, without having to pull it into memory first (saves memory if it's huge)
• getstore to save the contents of a URL directly to file, without holding it in memory first.