Once upon a time, I had to write a suite of test programs for NNTP, HTTP, POP3, SMTP and FTP servers. I used perl because it was preferable to shell scripting, which was the way used prior to that (it only did simple SMTP and NNTP posting operations).

The problem? The only system that could run these tests was a very unflexibly administered Solaris box with a very stripped install of Perl. Adding modules was strictly verboten, even in my home directory.

I didn't even have IO::Socket to draw on. I reinvented four wheels, one axle, the concept of glass and I think power steering, but it got the job done and produced some very nice results. You never know when you're going to have to produce results without even 'standard' modules.

And no, I never figured out why some modules were missing. They had been present once, the docs were still there, but even an extended probe with the find command didn't turn them up.

5-21-2000 : Fixed the typo in 'steering'

In reply to Reinventing by The Alien
in thread Help with string concat and sockets by jen

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