I'm getting a little frustrated trying to run some perl (LWP) services on a gentoo box sitting behind a proxy.

I'm not sure of how else to get at the environment settings for perl, but figured starting with
per -MCPAN -e shell
would be good. If that'll go through the proxy and pickup stuff surely that'd be all that was needed.
I can't even get that to go through the proxy. http_proxy, ftp_proxy and no_proxy environment variables are already set, which it picks up as it goes throught the initial configuration, yet when it tries to connect and grab a mirrored.by file, it fails.
I can see it from inside Firefox under gnome though. Links can't, and neither can WGET however.

WGET returns 16:24:48 ERROR -1: Malformed status line.

I do know that the proxy server requires user@hostort for ftp transfers, but I'm stumped as to how you actually apply this?

Fixed wget by editing the relevant /etc configuration file for it to manually specify the proxy.

I've resolved the perl issues too. Seems that unlike the rest of the system, perl needs "http://" in front of its proxy environment variables (including the ftp one, a quirk of the proxy I guess)

No, Lynx needed prepending too.