in reply to Perl script to download web content

I assume that this is a homework problem, and that it's not the intention to just use an existing script, even if it comes straight from CPAN.

In that case, you can still make use of a module, because that's what you ought to do when doing this for a real script, so I suggest you take a good looks at LWP::Simple, in particular the subs get and getstore.