Dear Monks,

I'm trying to send a GET request to localhost in an attempt to fetch a perl script in my Apache cgi-bin directory.

Here is what I have for the following variables:

my $host = 'localhost';
my $path = '/cgi-bin/second.pl';
my $port = 80;
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If I use the short form of IO::Socket::INET->new() and create a socket like this:

my $CONN = IO::Socket::INET->new("$host:$port")
   or die "Couldn't connect: $!";
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I am able to send a request:

my $req = "GET $path HTTP/1.0 $CRLF$CRLF";
$CONN->syswrite($req);
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...and then I can read the header that the server sends back just fine:

$/ = CRLF . CRLF;   #To read the whole header as one 'line'
binmode $CONN;      #Turn off \n conversion for getline() in next line

my $header = $CONN->getline;
$header =~ s/$CRLF/\n/g;
say $header;

--output:--
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:28:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l DAV/2 PHP/5.2
+.3 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.4.4
Content-Length: 294
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
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However, if I keep everything the same, and I try to create the socket using the long format:

my $CONN = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Peerhost    => $host,
    Peerport    => 'http(80)',
) or die "Couldn't connect: $!";
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I get the following errors:

Use of uninitialized value $header in substitution (s///) at 4perl.pl 
+line 55.
Use of uninitialized value $header in say at 4perl.pl line 56.
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I also tried using just 80 for the Peerport, and I get the same result. Can anyone tell me why I am unable to retrieve the header using the long format for IO::Socket::INET->new()?

Thanks

Here's the full program:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use IO::Socket qw{ :DEFAULT :crlf };

my $host = 'localhost';
my $path = '/cgi-bin/second.pl';
my $port = 80;

=pod
my $CONN = IO::Socket::INET->new("$host:$port")
    or die "Couldn't connect: $!";
=cut

my $CONN = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Peerhost    => $host,
    Peerport    => 'http(80)',
) or die "Couldn't connect: $!";

my $req = "GET $path HTTP/1.0 $CRLF$CRLF";
$CONN->syswrite($req);

$/ = CRLF . CRLF; #To read whole header as one 'line'
binmode $CONN; #turn off \n conversion for getline() below

my $header = $CONN->getline;
$header =~ s/$CRLF/\n/g;
say $header;

$CONN->close;
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