The easiest way to retrieve a webpage using Perl is to use the LWP::Simple module :

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

my $page = get 'http://www.example.com';
print $page;
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Another way is to use the wget executable, if you have it installed :

use strict;

my $url = 'http://www.example.com';

my $page = `wget -q -O - "$url"`;
print $page;
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If you want even more interaction with the page, take a look at WWW::Mechanize. If you want to parse the page after retrieving it to extract data, take a look at HTML::TableExtract and/or HTML::Parser.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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my $url = 'http://www.example.com';
my $page = `wget -q -O - "$url"`;

This way it is ok. But note that if the contents of $url comes from an untrusted source (e.g. a field in a form or part of a URL), then simply calling wget with the parameter listed, is very dangerous.

Consider what would happen if $url would be '"; find /"'. Then consider what would happen if someone would call a program other than "find".

Liz

You can make the use of wget secure by using the shell's quoting mechanism and environment variables.

Read more... (592 Bytes)

You can also use the open(WGET,"|-") construct with exec to do this safely.

Read more... (828 Bytes)

I agree in general that this is a less safe approach, but if it's the only option it can be done safely.