gethostbyname seems to return a packed ip address, in scalar context. You might use the Socket library to get the inet_ntoa function: 
use Socket;

my $packed_ip = gethostbyname('slashdot.org');
my $ip = inet_ntoa($packed_ip);
print "$ip\n";

[download]

Update: The parenthesis don't matter in this case. I usually use them to avoid precedence misunderstandings, though.

In reply to Re: gethostbyname bug? by chromatic
in thread gethostbyname bug? by geektron

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