Hrm, here's the code for the LWP::Simple::head() sub:

sub head ($)
{
    my($url) = @_;
    _init_ua() unless $ua;

    my $request = HTTP::Request->new(HEAD => $url);
    my $response = $ua->request($request);

    if ($response->is_success) {
        return $response unless wantarray;
        return (scalar $response->header('Content-Type'),
                scalar $response->header('Content-Length'),
                HTTP::Date::str2time($response->header('Last-Modified'
+)),
                HTTP::Date::str2time($response->header('Expires')),
                scalar $response->header('Server'),
               );
    }
    return;
}
[download]

So it looks like it tries to return an array, but what happens if it doesn't get a modified time, or any other element for that matter? It seems to return whatever it gets w/o putting any placeholders in:

[jane]:~/cat test.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
my @array = head(shift);
my $i = 0;
foreach my $line (@array) {
  print "$i: $line\n";
  $i++;
}

[jane]:~/perl test.pl http://www.fdntech.com
0: text/html
1: 
2: Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) PHP/3.0.14
[jane]:~/
[download]

So, it looks as though it's not really behaving how we would wish it to. Perhaps it should return a hash? Am I totally off-base there?