Thanks guys for your feedback! JimH44, thanks for your suggestion. I used Ketarin for a long time, but I never really pieced together how people used it to check versions of programs on the web. Now that you mention this process, it seems obvious . I myself am still coming to grips with regular expressions, so the pattern recognition you've given helps tremendously... In any case, I've implemented your idea in my script, and updated it on github. I did end up using wget to snag a copy of the html, and used your one-line perl script to dump the version number into the URL (pretty much the