We recently had need to grab a small file from each of some 100+ boxes (network management devices running NT4 client) to a Perl script running on Solaris. We can't make changes on these clients but the file is available on a network share.

Enter the Filesys::SmbClient module, the documentation of which shows the use of a Tie that would make reading the file much easier. The example however does not pass any parameters like login credentials.

We eventually got the following to work. 

#!perl -w
use strict;
use POSIX;

my @args = (
    username => 'userid',
    password => 'passwd',
    debug => 10
);
my $filename = 'smb://host/directory/file';

local *FD;
tie *FD, 'Filesys::SmbClient', $filename, '0666', @args;

while (<FD>) {print}
close(FD);

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We haven't yet used this in anger, it works on a single device and hopefully on all the rest too.

Comment are welcome on any better way to go about this and the program will only need to be run 2-3 times a year.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Tie and Filesys::SmbClient
by hipowls (Curate) on Mar 08, 2008 at 02:53 UTC

    It works for me;) I made some changes just to try out the object API and found a bug (I think) in version 3.1 of Filesys::SmbClient. The docs say that the return from read is undef at EOF but it is actually an empty string.

    Personally I'd use a hash for the arguments to emphasize that they are key value pairs. Makes no difference to perl but it will be easier to maintain and you get a warning if the numbers aren't even. The use POSIX isn't required by your example.

    The object oriented approach (which tie uses behind the scenes) 

    use strict;
use warnings;

use Filesys::SmbClient;

my %args     = (
    username  => 'account',
    password  => 'secret',
    workgroup => 'domain',
    debug     => 0
);

my $smb = new Filesys::SmbClient(%args);

my $filename = 'smb://server/share/directory/file.name';
my $remote = $smb->open($filename) or die "Can't open $filename: $!\n"
+;
open my $local, '>', 'file.name' or die "Can't open file.name: $!\n";

while ( defined( my $buffer = $smb->read($remote) ) ) {
    last if $buffer eq '';
    print {$local} $buffer;
}

$smb->close($fd);

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Re: Tie and Filesys::SmbClient
by okram (Monk) on Mar 07, 2008 at 23:37 UTC
    Hi
    tie works like this: "tie VARIABLE,CLASSNAME,LIST".
    The "variable" is your *FD, "classname", correctly, is 'Filesys::SmbClient', and all the other stuff afterwards is exactly what you'd pass to Filesys::SmbClient->new().
    You would basically want to change your code to read: 
    local *FD;
tie *FD, 'Filesys::SmbClient', @args;
open FD, 'smb://host/directory/file'
    or die "Can't read file:", $!, "\n";
print while (<FD>);
close (FD);

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    If you skip the part about "using the two or three params open()" (use the right one), this *should* work.
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