How did you use fopen? You should be able to send a properly formatted HEAD request and get back something like this:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Netscape-FastTrack/2.0a
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:16:16 GMT
Accept-ranges: bytes
Last-modified: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 23:15:57 GMT
Content-length: 1657
Content-type: text/html
However, if it's dynamic content, the information may be incorrect. Here is the HEAD from my Web server whose index page is a PHP document full of "live" data.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:21:03 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0
Last-Modified: Mon, 07 Aug 2000 14:51:11 GMT
ETag: "4fdf6-172a-398eccdf"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5930
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
X-Pad: avoid browser bug