Some people have reported that they had trouble with automating logging in to cbstream with the new login mechanism. Thus, hereby I publish an example that worked for me.

This is a shell command that starts a new connection to the irc server assuming your nick and sending a permanent login message to cbstream. For this reason, you have to run this before connecting with your real irc client, or there'd be a nick clash.

The command is in bash, requires netcat, but it wouldn't be too hard to convert it to a simple perl script as well.

It uses the values of four shell parameters that you should previously set, these must contain your irc nickserv password, irc nick, perlmonks user name, and perlmonks password respectively. If the perlmonks user or password contains strange characters, you have to use a quoted form that cbstream accepts. 

echo $'PASS :'"$IRCPASS"$'\nUSER 0 0 0 x\nNICK '"$IRCNICK"$'\nJOIN #cb
+stream-login\nPRIVMSG #cbstream-login :plogin '"$PMUSER $PMPASS"$'\nQ
+UIT\n' | nc -v irc.freenode.net 6667

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Logging in to cbstream from a script
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Aug 07, 2008 at 20:40 UTC

    By "Some people" you were politely avoiding mentioning my nick :-P

    By "trouble" I was pointing out that: a) I had to learn an entirely new manner of coding in perl (Xchat's interface, and hook-programming in general, which seems backwards relative to procedural or OO programming), b) the curve combined with less-than-stellar documentation for the Xchat interface resulted in surprises which were difficult to overcome. I suspect it took me about 5 or 6 hours to get to a working Xchat script (though if I knew what I was doing, it likely would have been less than one hour), whereas if the interface were to be using CGI on the server side, a quick LWP or WWW::Mechanize script would have been whipped out in a matter of five minutes. (In fact, you probably would have had one already for testing with.) Granted, this would be far more work for you than the current method... :-)

    However, I did get something that seems to work. It doesn't fully auto-login. I haven't yet figured out how to get it to run as I do my initial connect to the FreeNode server, but just typing "/cblog" is sufficiently easy to remember. For others who use Xchat, here is what I ended up with: 

    #! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $name = 'cbstream';
my $version = 0.01;

my %conf = (
            cbstream => {
                pmuser => 'Tanktalus',
                pmpassword => 'myperlmonkspasswordisreallylongbuteasyt
+oremember',
            },
           );
sub _get_conf
{
    my $conf = shift;
    my @var  = @_;

    if (@var > 1)
    {
        if (exists $conf->{$var[0]})
        {
            my $rc = _get_conf($conf->{$var[0]}, @var[1..$#var]);
            return defined $rc ? $rc : $conf->{$var[-1]};
        }
    }
    $conf->{$var[-1]};
}

sub get_conf
{
    my @var = @_;
    return _get_conf(\%conf, @var);
}

Xchat::register($name, $version);

Xchat::hook_print('You Join', \&JoinCBStreamLogin);
Xchat::hook_command('cblog', sub { Xchat::command 'join #cbstream-logi
+n'; Xchat::EAT_ALL });
Xchat::hook_server('PRIVMSG', \&LeaveCBStreamLogin);

# once logged in, tell cbstream what our id and pw is.
sub JoinCBStreamLogin
{
    my $info = shift;

    if (Xchat::get_info('network') eq 'FreeNode')
    {
        if ($info->[1] eq '#cbstream-login')
        {
            my $id = get_conf('cbstream','pmuser');
            my $pw = get_conf('cbstream','pmpassword');
            if ($id and $pw)
            {
                Xchat::command("say plogin $id $pw");
            }
            return Xchat::EAT_NONE;
        }
    }
    Xchat::EAT_NONE;
}

sub LeaveCBStreamLogin
{
    my $msg = shift;
    my $nth = shift;

    if (Xchat::get_info('network') eq 'FreeNode')
    {
        LOG Dumper($msg);
        if ($msg->[0] =~ /^:cbstream!/ and
            $msg->[1] eq 'PRIVMSG' and
            lc $msg->[2] eq lc Xchat::get_info('nick') and
            $nth->[3] =~ /You are now persistently logged in as perlmo
+nks user/)
        {
            Xchat::set_context('cbstream');
            Xchat::command('close');
            Xchat::set_context('#cbstream-login');
            Xchat::command('close');
            Xchat::set_context('#cbstream');
            (my $msg = $nth->[3]) =~ s/^:\+//;
            Xchat::print("CBLOGIN: $nth->[3]");

            return Xchat::EAT_ALL;
        }
    }
    return Xchat::EAT_NONE;
}

    [download]
    You'll obviously have to change the user and password near the top.

    Save this to a file with a .pl extention in your xchat directory (for me on unix, it's ~/.xchat2, on Windows it should be something like "C:\Documents and Settings\youruser\Application Data\X-Chat 2"). I think that will get it autoloading, though I've not really tested to be sure. Then you can just type "/cblog" to log in to cbstream.

    The surprising bit was that I couldn't merge the "join" command with the "say plogin" command in the same routine. They had to be separate. I also haven't figured out how to leave #cbstream-login, nor close its tab. Nor close the private-message tab opened when cbstream responds telling me I'm now persistently logged in. Thanks, ambrus.

    Update: closing tabs is fine... restoring your last tab is interestingly not. Added code to handle the closing of tabs - though it happens too quick, so I've opted to copy the message over to the #cbstream tab (it doesn't get sent to the IRC server, so your secret of using IRC for CB remains safe).

[reply]
[d/l]

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