libnet is a collection of Perl modules which provides a simple and consistent programming interface (API) to the client side of various protocols used in the internet community. For details of each protocol please refer to the RFC. RFC's can be found a various places on the WEB, for a staring point look at: http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Standards/RFCs/ The RFC implemented in this distribution are Net::FTP RFC959 File Transfer Protocol Net::SMTP RFC821 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Net::Time RFC867 Daytime Protocol Net::Time RFC868 Time Protocol Net::NNTP RFC977 Network News Transfer Protocol Net::POP3 RFC1939 Post Office Protocol 3 Net::SNPP RFC1861 Simple Network Pager Protocol FUTURE WORK AVAILABILITY The latest version of libnet is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). To find a CPAN site near you see: http://www.perl.com/CPAN ^ no slash here !! INSTALLATION In order to use this package you will need Perl version 5.002 or better. You install libnet, as you would install any perl module library, by running these commands: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install If you want to install a private copy of libnet in your home directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with something like this command: perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=~/perl The Makefile.PL program will start out by checking your perl installation for a few packages that are recommended to be installed together with libnet. These packages should be available on CPAN (described above). CONFIGURE Normally when perl Makefile.PL is run it will run Configure which will ask some questions about your system. The results of these questions will be stored in a file called libnet.cfg which will be installed alongside the other perl modules in this distribution. The Makefile.PL will run Configure in an interactive mode unless these exists a file called libnet.cfg in the build directory. If you are on a system which cannot run this script you can create an empty file to make Makefile.PL skip running Configure. If you want to keep your existing settings and not run interactivly the simple run Configure -d before running the Makefile.PL. DOCUMENTATION See ChangeLog for recent changes. POD style documentation is included in all modules and scripts. These are normally converted to manual pages and installed as part of the "make install" process. You should also be able to use the 'perldoc' utility to extract documentation from the module files directly. DEMOS The demos directory does contain a few demo scripts. These should be run from the top directory like demos/smtp.self -user my-email-address -debug However I do not guarantee these scripts to work. SUPPORT Questions about how to use this library should be directed to the comp.lang.perl.modules USENET Newsgroup. Bug reports and suggestions for improvements can be sent to me at . Most of the modules in this library have an option to output a debug transcript to STDERR. When reporting bugs/problems please, if possible, include a transcript of a run. COPYRIGHT © 1996-2000 Graham Barr. All rights reserved. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. Share and Enjoy!