My dad came to visit and I was showing him the internet so I never have to write a letter again(email)! I was showing him how to bid on things on ebay. We placed a bid on a coin he wanted, but he was driving me crazy checking it every five minutes. I decided to take the email feature from my adminmail.pl(posted already) program and the webpage grabbing feature of my fatbrain.pl(also posted) program. I turned it into the program you see bellow to tell me if I lose the high bid. I set it in cron to check every five minutes and we were able to relax the rest of the weekend. I never thought perl would improve my relationship with my dad, but it did! What other programming language can say that! Since I had the code written and a pager that accepts email it took about five minutes to setup. I am sure my fellow monks will come up with creative ways to use email pagers!

There is a line in the code that generates an error. Something like "System cannot find file." The line is marked bellow. The program works, but I was just curious.

use strict;
use Net::SMTP;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $from = 'ergowolf07@home.com';
my @recip_list = ('XXXXXXX@skytel.com');
my $smtp_host = "mail";

# This line generates and error
my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($smtp_host, Timeout => 30) || die "Can't con
+nect to $smtp_host.\n";


$smtp->mail($from) || die "cannot mail from.\n\n";

$smtp->recipient(@recip_list);    
$smtp->data();

$smtp->datasend("To:\tEbay info\n");

my $page = 'http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=XXX
+XXXXXXX';
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $req = new HTTP::Request GET => $page;
my $string = $ua->request($req)->as_string;
if ($string =~ m/tmonte/g) {
    $smtp->datasend("you are the high bidder.\n");
} else {
    $smtp->datasend("You are no longer the high bidder.\n");
}

$smtp->dataend;
$smtp->quit;

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In reply to Ebay, my pager and my dad by ergowolf

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