Thank you all for your excellent answers. Zentara, you're really beyond human ;-} I appreciate the code.
Just to be clear, I cannot use "system" because I need to report on the status of the pages I am analyzing. Most of these link are huge PDF files. I am not really interested in the content but just the status header information. MHTTP and GHTTP sound very useful. I will have to benchmark them against wget. Frankly, I'd rather just use Perl.
Again, thank you for your help. You guys rock!