I have contacted the author of Net::Printer, Chris Fuhrman.


Let's quote a small snippet of his answer:
---cut-here---
What I'm tenatively planning on doing is re-writing
Net::Printer using IO::Socket instead of setting
things up manually. This makes it easier for me to
debug it in the future as well as hopefully
eliminate the
taint problem.
---cut-off---

That's great, I hope he finds the time to finish it
soon.
--
there are no silly questions killerhippy