Using unpack here seems a bit awkward. Why not use the builtins from Socket and simplify? 
    use Socket;

    my $hostname = 'yahoo.com';
    print inet_ntoa(inet_aton($hostname)),"\n";

[download]
inet_aton converts from "ASCII" to "Network", and as a bonus will resolve host names. The reverse, inet_ntoa, will do the inverse, though it will always give you a dotted IP and not the name. To find that out, you will have to use Net::DNS.

You will note that it puts out different answers on occasion, though, because there are many possible addresses to choose from, and they are selected at random, which is called "Round Robin DNS".

As a side note, this code will die "Bad arg length..." if fed an invalid or unresolvable address. This can be fixed by splitting it into two steps and verifying that inet_aton() actually returned something.

In reply to Re^3: gethostbyname not working by tadman
in thread gethostbyname not working by nick

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