in reply to PC to PC

To be honest, ethernet cards and cable are pretty dirt cheap nowadays. Might be worth the time, effort, and expense to just hook them up with a method that actually is designed for transfering files. Back in the day when LPT communication was prevalent, network cards were well over a hundred dollars. And LPT ports were built-in (well, I suppose the pedantic might point out that they usually still are). So it would be cheaper to grab a parallel cable or two, splice them up, and communicate that way. I even recall doing this once as a "fast" way to share files between my BBS and someone else's.

Nowadays, $10 gets you two ethernet cards which are usually just plug-and-play. Another $10 maybe will get you a cross-over ethernet cable. And, if both sides are Windows, you should already be able to "net use" from one to the other. So, for $20+tax, you can use all the built-in networking of your current systems rather than debugging something built nearly from scratch. And you can do much more with it - have one machine print to the other machine's printer, for example. Or anything else that NetBEUI or TCP can do.

I mean, perl is great and all, but at the end of the day, there is a job to be done, and it can be less expensive to do things the normal way than other ways ;-)