LWP::Simple is about the easiest way, although you forego fine-grained error checking. The basic recipe goes like this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;

my $local = time . ".txt";
my $url = "http://www.example.com/";

my $page = get($url) or die "failed!\n";

open my $out, '>', $local or die "Cannot open $local for output: $!\n"
+;
print $out $page;
close $out;
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You can then wrap that up in a cmd file:

@echo off
c:
cd \path\to\program\dir
perl get-page.pl
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And run that as a scheduled task. Make sure the scheduled task service is enabled and running. You might want to think of a better name for your local file.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

my $url  = '';
my $file = '';
my $resp = '';

print 'Please enter a URL: ';
chomp( $url = <STDIN> );

print 'Please enter a filename in which to store the data: ';
chomp( $file = <STDIN> );

# We don't want to overwrite a file that already exists so using the '
+-e' essentially asks: Does a file of this name
# already exist? If so, the message is displayed and the program exits
+.
if( -e $file ) { 
   die "Sorry. That filename already exists.\n";
}

# The 'getstore' function returns an http response code e.g. 200, 404,
+ etc. 
# The syntax says: Store the data obtained from '$url' in '$file'. 
$resp = getstore( $url, $file ); 

exit;
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Here's my own example:

#!C:/Perl/bin/perl.exe

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple qw( mirror is_error RC_NOT_MODIFIED );

my $url  = 'http://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/dics/pocket.txt';
my $file = $url;

$file =~ s{.*/}{};

my $status = mirror($url, $file);

if (is_error($status)) {
    die "Can't get text file at URL $url\n";
}

if ($status == RC_NOT_MODIFIED) {
    warn "File $file not modified\n";
}

# Do something with freshened file named pocket.txt...

exit 0;
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Cheers!

Jim

Thanks all! I went with the LWP Perl modules to access remote files. And that worked very well. ' thanks, kc

If you use Windows, I believe (but am not 100% sure) that Start -> Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks is the cron equivalent and you can find wget for Windows here.