Thanks, LWP worked brilliantly.

Just as an aside for anyone looking at this thread in the future, I am behind a firewall and so had to add the following code to make it all work.

use LWP::Simple qw(&getstore &is_success $ua);

The above imports the $ua variable and the subs I needed, $ua (User Agent, see LWP::UserAgent) is used to set proxy settings.

# Initialise the proxy
$ua->proxy(http => 'http://wwwcache.ex.ac.uk:8080'); 
#$ua->proxy_authorization_basic( 'username', 'password' );
[download]

The above actually sets the proxy. I didn't need any proxy auth, but you might, hence the line is there but commented out. Once this is done the subs like getstore worked great.

Hope this helps in the future.

Best wishes and thanks again, Arun