Net::Telnet, version 3.01 Copyright (c) 1997 Jay Rogers. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. What's In It For You -------------------- . You'd like to communicate with another host or device via a TELNET port and you'd like some specialized routines to help you login and do other interactive things. . You're not familiar with sockets and you want a simple way to make client connections to TCP services. . You want to be able to specify your own time-out while connecting, reading, and writing. . You're communicating with an interactive program at the other end of some socket or pipe and you want to wait for certain patterns to appear. Archive Location ---------------- . In the CPAN directory: modules/by-module/Net/ . To find a CPAN site near you see http://cpan.perl.org/SITES.html Prerequisites ------------- . Perl Version 5.002 or later . A Windows 95/NT machine requires Perl version 5.003_07 or later . No other modules are required that don't already come with a standard distribution of Perl. Description ----------- Net::Telnet allows you to make client connections to a TCP port and do network I/O, especially to a port using the TELNET protocol. Simple I/O methods such as print, get, and getline are provided. More sophisticated interactive features are provided because connecting to a TELNET port ultimately means communicating with a program designed for human interaction. These interactive features include the ability to specify a timeout and to wait for patterns to appear in the input stream, such as the prompt from a shell. Here's an example that prints who's logged-on to the remote host sparky. In addition to a username and password, you must also know the user's shell prompt, which for this example is bash$ use Net::Telnet (); $t = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 10, Prompt => '/bash\$ $/'); $t->open("sparky"); $t->login($username, $passwd); @lines = $t->cmd("/usr/bin/who"); print @lines; See the user documentation for more examples. This is an alpha version - meaning that the interface may change in future versions. Contact me, Jay Rogers , if you find any bugs or have suggestions for improvement. Documentation ------------- User documentation in POD format is contained within the module source (i.e. the .pm file). Installing using "make install" places this documentation in a man page in the perl library under the directory "man/man3". Installation ------------ To install, cd to the directory containing the unpacked distribution and do one of the following: a. Create a makefile by running Makefile.PL using the perl program into whose library you want to install and then run make three times: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install b. To install into a private library, for example your home directory: perl Makefile.PL INSTALLSITELIB=$HOME/lib INSTALLMAN3DIR=$HOME/man make make test make pure_install c. Alternatively, you can just copy or move Telnet.pm from the distribution into a directory named Net/ in the Perl library. You can then manually build the documentation using pod2man or pod2html. -- Jay Rogers jay@rgrs.com December 27, 1997