I am writing a script to check if a list of URLs exist. I have been using something like the following: 
use LWP::Simple;
my $url = 'http://www.domain.com/';
if (head($url)) {
  print "Does exist\n";
} else {
  print "Does not exist\n";;
}

[download]
The above works very well for me except for one thing. If my internet connection drops for a minute or the site takes a really long time to respond my script hangs until it times out. I wanted to implement a shorter timeout but found that you can only do this with LWP::UserAgent.

Reading some documentation I can do this but I seem to be having problems verifying if the data I get back means the site exists. Also I need to be able to check http urls as well as ftp urls. I would prefer to use HEAD instead of GET as some of these pages are very large. I need to check somewhere on the order of 20 pages on about 200 URLs so this process takes a while and using a GET for all of these pages would just make it take all the much longer.

Can anyone provide me with some assistance and possible a sample script?

Thanks!

In reply to Check if URL exists by sivel

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