You definitely should use something more advanced then this for a real application. This little snippet could defintely use some better error checking, etc. But it should demonstrate how to use Perl's IO::Socket interface without cluttering it up to much.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use IO::Socket;

$server = 'www.newbie.org';
$port = 80;

$socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(
Proto => 'tcp',
PeerAddr => $server,
PeerPort => $port,
Timeout => 10,
);
unless($socket) {
die("Could not connect to $server:$port");
}
$socket->autoflush(1);
print $socket ("GET / HTTP/1.0\nHost: $server\nReferer: http://www.newbie.org\nUser-Agent: Simple Socket 1.2b\n\n");
$off = 1;
while ($line = <$socket>) {
if ($line =~ /^\s*$/) {
$off = 0;
}
unless ($off) {
print($line);
}
}
exit();