by Corion:

Personally, I haven't heard of any such projects or truly
portable clients other than your webbrowser for those services.
I've looked at some of these services, namely iDrive
and Freespace. Both of them use Javascript and cookies to
present the files and store your login information, and 
iDrive uses the https protocol. All of these issues should be taken care of
by the LWP module. Writing the actual code to parse
out the directory contents and manipulate them will be
tough work, as you will have to design an uniform interface
to these services.

I'm sorry to desillusion you, but the only "true" hacking
taking place would be in staring at some Javascript embedded
in some HTML to extract the filenames and file URLs from there :)

Thanks for your reply, Corion.

While it is true that the main way to interact with those services is through the Web browser (rather narrow range of recent ones that those services "support"), in fact several of them (<CITE>xdrive</CITE>, <CITE>freediskspace</CITE>) have downloadable applications that, once installed to the user's Windoze system, allow the remote storage area to appear as a "virtual hard drive" mapped to a drive letter for 'doze. This takes place purely outside of one's browser, in fact the browser does not even have to be running.

LWP would be the way to go for sure if one was going to try to simulate the client-server interaction that takes place when one is doing the ordinary Web-based transfers. However the alternate method that these downloadable apps suggest is possible, could also be implemented in Perl, and would possibly be lower-level hacking than using LWP.

soren