I agree. Perl is a glue language, nothing wrong with controlling through console streams a console app to do the heavy lifting for your script, I/O or CPU or memory wise. Some tasks are better to do in a C/C++ based program than in Perl, but nothing with using Perl to control the C program. I've found that console HTTP downloaders always work better and faster for me than LWP unless very complicated forms or non standard HTTP verbs are required.