A while ago I asked whether anyone had built a working ICQ client in Perl (Working Net::ICQ client anyone?).

I never did get any good replies, but I'm thinking of tackling it again, so thought I'd throw out how I think it would work and hope someone will pitch in with their thoughts:

1. write a local client/server that runs locally listening for send requests, whilst keeping the ICQ session open with the ICQ server

2. write a module to send the messages to the listening ICQ client/server. Eg, following methods: 

my $icq = ICQserve::new();
$icq->uin(123456);
$icq->message("this is the message");
$icq->send();

[download]
If the client/server is down, it restarts it (hopefully it would die nicely to an error log somewhere :-)

But, not being a sysadmin type, and not having done a lot of socket stuff, I wonder whether I'd encounter problems with keeping a port (socket? whatever...) open locally to listen for ICQ messages to send (only from local scripts). I was also thinking of pumping received messages through a script too, but let's keep it to sending just for now.

So has anyone made any progress on this? Is there anyone out there who would like to pitch in to make this work? - I think i may need some help with the sockets stuff.

I just think it would be damn useful for server alerts etc... Or am I just reinventing the wheel - ie, is there a shell ICQ client already available that we could pipe stuff to?

All thoughts welcomed on this.

cLive ;-)

--
seek(JOB,$$LA,0);

In reply to ICQ using Perl by cLive ;-)

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.