LWP::UserAgent is more "full featured"

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict; 
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();

$ua->cookie_jar({});
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7)');
$ua->timeout(42); # seconds
$ua->proxy('http', 'http://proxy.sn.no:8001/');
$ua->no_proxy('com.com');

my $response1 = $ua->get('http://www.cnet.com/');

my $response2 = $ua->head('http://news.com/');

my $response3 = $ua->post('http://bugz.foo.com/postbug.cgi',
                          {'descr'     => 'your bug description',
                           'component' => 'your bug component',
                           'priority'  => 'P1' });