I am writing a low-level web client that is having problems connecting to some types of web servers. I find that from some IIS 6.0 web servers and other custom webservers I am unable to receive a response from, and my program returns with no response.

I am able to duplicate the problem with the short script I have created below ( let's call it http.pl ) and I run it like this > ./http.pl www.oracle.com 80

Using 'telnet www.oracle.com 80' and sending HTTP request headers ( GET / HTTP/1.0 ) I can view a response no problem. Why can't the script below do it, and how do I fix this problem?

I would really prefer to use just lower level sockets so I can time the DNS resolution, page response time but more specifically the TCP connection overhead time as this will be part of my display.

Thank you.

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

$|++;

my( $host, $port, $kidpid, $handle, $line );

( $host, $port ) = @ARGV;

my $msg = qq{HEAD / HTTP/1.0\nHOST: $host\n\n};

$handle = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Proto    => 'tcp',
    PeerAddr    => $host,
    PeerPort    => $port,
    Blocking    => 0) or die("$!");

$handle->autoflush(1);

$handle->send( $msg, undef, "test" );
my @results;
for( 0..10 ) {
    last if @results = $handle->getlines;
    select(undef, undef, undef, .5);
}
print @results;
exit;
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