comment on

That's not surprising because you changed the code in the example! The actual code provided is:

use IO::Socket;

my $server = shift;
my $fh     = IO::Socket::INET->new($server);
my $line   = <$fh>;
print $line;
[download]

...and it works fine:

% perl lgetr.pl mail.hotmail.com:smtp
220 mc5-f26.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mail 
+to Microsoft's computer network is prohibited. Other restrictions are
+ found at http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result i
+n use of equipment located in California and other states. Sat, 30 Ap
+r 2005 19:25:12 -0700
[download]

To make it a bit more informative, I would change the line where $fh is initialized to

my $fh = IO::Socket::INET->new($server) or die "Socket open failed: $^
+E\n";
[download]

Then, if you give it an unavailable server, instead of trying to read from an unopened handle, the program prints out an intelligible error message and exits:

% perl lgetr.pl wuarchive.wustl.edu:daytime
Socket open failed: Connection refused
[download]

Update: s/!/^E/.

If you insist on doing it your way, you need to chomp the input line, and instead of giving the input as a command line argument, you must enter it via standard input. E.g.:

use IO::Socket;

my $site = <STDIN>;
chomp $site;

my $fh = IO::Socket::INET->new($site) or die "Socket open failed: $^E\
+n";
my $line = <$fh>;
print $line;
__END__
% perl lgetr.pl[HIT RETURN HERE]
mail.hotmail.com:smtp[HIT RETURN HERE]
220 mc5-f26.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mail 
+to Microsoft's computer network is prohibited. Other restrictions are
+ found at http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result i
+n use of equipment located in California and other states. Sat, 30 Ap
+r 2005 19:28:52 -0700
[download]

The above works on Linux, at least. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the Windows CLI to be able to say whether it would work exactly like this there.

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: Network Programming With Perl example 1 by tlm
in thread Network Programming With Perl example 1 by Anonymous Monk

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