O Monks,

I have an open-source app that lets users upload files to a server via ftp, and I would like to allow sftp as well. Assuming I ever have any users :-), they might be naive users, so I want it to be easy to install. I would also like it to run on both Unix and non-Unix systems.

I started off thinking I'd use Net::SFTP, but when I grabbed it via CPAN it was not straightforward. It had lots of dependencies, one of which was Math::Pari. Math::Pari failed a bunch of its tests after compilation, and the tests still hadn't finished after running all night. OK, if it was just me, I might be willing to work on getting it to run, but I can't ask end-users to go through the same process.

I next thought about doing it via a shell. This has the disadvantage that it won't work outside of Unix, but it wouldn't require any extra installation on a Unix machine. The problem I'm running into is that the Unix sftp command-line program always takes the password via a terminal, whereas my app is a Perl/Tk GUI. I want the user to type the password into a dialog box, and then have the uploading start.

Is there any easy way to do all this?

Thanks in advance, O Monks.