FAQ 8.31 Can I use perl to run a telnet or ftp session?

This is an excerpt from the latest version perlfaq8.pod, which
comes with the standard Perl distribution. These postings aim to
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8.31: Can I use perl to run a telnet or ftp session?

Try the Net::FTP, TCP::Client, and Net::Telnet modules (available from
CPAN). http://www.cpan.org/scripts/netstuff/telnet.emul.shar will also
help for emulating the telnet protocol, but Net::Telnet is quite
probably easier to use..

If all you want to do is pretend to be telnet but don't need the initial
telnet handshaking, then the standard dual-process approach will
suffice:

use IO::Socket; # new in 5.004
$handle = IO::Socket::INET->new('www.perl.com:80')
or die "can't connect to port 80 on www.perl.com: $!";
$handle->autoflush(1);
if (fork()) { # XXX: undef means failure
select($handle);
print while <STDIN>; # everything from stdin to socket
} else {
print while <$handle>; # everything from socket to stdout
}
close $handle;
exit;



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