Just been having a play with Net::ICQ.

It's still alpha, but seems to do the job.

I can make it send a message OK, but the trouble is I don't know how to (or if I can) connect to the client when running to send another event.

If I connect, send message, then disconnect, my UIN gets blocked after a while and a manual login gives me a "rate limit exceeded" message (ie, trying to connect to ICQ too many times in a short period is naughty).

My guess is I have to run the client continuously, and pipe messages to it as and when needed, but I have no idea how to do this. I want to be able to do something like this from another script on the server:

use ICQsend; # my prog below, amended

my $message = "whatever i want to send";

ICQsend::message( uin     => 12345678,
                  content => $message);
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Has anyone actually written a Perl shell ICQ client that can be called painlessly from an external script? If so, how did you approach it?

cLive ;-)

Here's my hacked-from-the-docs example that sends one message and quits (but only if you reply to it?!?), in case you're interested.

- apologies if it looks messy, but I only started looking at the protocol this morning, and have yet to find a good description of what each function does...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Net::ICQ;
use Data::Dumper;

my (
    $icq,
    $ready
   );

# my uin and password go here
$icq = Net::ICQ->new('12345678','*******');

# register dump_event as the handler for ALL (!) events
foreach (values(%Net::ICQ::srv_codes)) {
  $icq->add_handler($_, \&dump_event);
}

# amend events for these
$icq->add_handler('SRV_X2', \&handle_x2);
$icq->add_handler('SRV_LOGIN_REPLY', \&handle_login_reply);
$icq->add_handler('SRV_SYS_DELIVERED_MESS', \&on_msg);

$icq->connect();
print "connecting...\n";
while (!$ready) {
  $icq->do_one_loop;
}
print "ready\n";

my $params = { 'type'         => 1,
               'text'         => 'this is a test message',
               'receiver_uin' => 23406993};

$icq->send_event('CMD_SEND_MESSAGE', $params);

$icq->start;
exit(0);


# what to do when message sent
sub on_msg {
    print "Message Sent\n";
    \&disconnect;
}

# dump event contents
sub dump_event {
  my ($icq, $event) = @_;
  print Dumper $event;
}

# send CMD_ACK_MESSAGES on X2 from server to keep it from 
# sending us any received offline msgs on next login
sub handle_x2 {
  my ($icq, $event) = @_;

  print (":X2\n");
  $icq->send_event('CMD_ACK_MESSAGES');
}

# set ready to 1 to signal we can send events now
sub handle_login_reply {
  my ($icq, $event) = @_;

  print (":LOGIN_REPLY\n");
  $ready = 1;
}

sub disconnect {
  $icq->disconnect();
  exit();
}
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