Accessing a URL through script

Hi,
I am faced with a problem. Is it possible to access a URL from Unix script and to check whether it is up and running?

I could find some perl scripts that can do the same , but could not get any info if we can achieve it with UNix.

Any help will be very useful.

Thanks in advance.

Use wget. Scan the response of wget and you will be on your way.

For more details see man wget.