Don't forget about telnet - when you telnet to another port besides 23 - you are using telnet as sort of a generic client.

And actually, Perl is a perfect tool for this sort of thing. There are two books out there I recommend you buy - O'Reilly's the Perl Cookbook and Addison-Wesley's Network Programming with Perl.

But to get you set up - here is a sample server straight from the cookbook:

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (LocalPort => 1200,
                 Proto     => 'tcp',
                 Listen    => 5,
                 Reuse     => 1,
                );
die "Can't connect: $!\n" unless $sock;

while (my $new_sock = $sock->accept()) {
    my $msg = <$new_sock>;
    print "client said '$msg'\n";
}
close $sock;
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and here is a sample client:

use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (PeerAddr => '127.0.0.1',
                 PeerPort => 1200,
                 Proto    => 'tcp',
                );
die "Can't create: $!\n" unless $sock;

print $sock "send money!";

close $sock;
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This is just a simple example - look into IO::Socket and also Socket.

Jeff

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