The idea of cut'n'paste between Perl and shell is seductive. I know I'm fond of heredocs and SQL. But I wonder if having to use a source filter is worth the pain.

With a bit of infrastructure it wouldn't be hard to produce a more Perlish interface. Consider a skeletal

#! /usr/bin/perl

package OpenSSL;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Exporter;
use vars qw(@ISA @EXPORT);
@ISA = 'Exporter';
@EXPORT = qw(openssl connect in s_client);

sub openssl {
    return bless {}, __PACKAGE__;
}

sub s_client {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{s_client} = 1;
}

sub connect {
    my $self = shift;
    my $uri  = shift;
    my $cert = frantic_hand_waving($uri);

    return $cert;
}

1;
[download]

This lets you write perfectly legal Perl code that looks like:

use OpenSSL;

my $cert = openssl->s_client->connect('myhost.com:443');
[download]

That would be fine by me. But then again, it's your itch, not mine. I think the idea is definitely worth pursuing one way or another.

update: well DUH! Should have read the opening line a bit more carefully... so there are modules that already do this, more fool me.

That said, I'm sure there must be a way to convince the interpreter that the openssl command line is valid Perl. I'll have to think about it.