Go to the owner of the server and say, "Hey, I'll give you this nice interpretter if you'll give me the last 128 bytes of that file right there." ??

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Please be much more specific.

1. What kind of server?
2. What transfer protocol?
3. Why exactly do you need to do this?

I know that LWP can be used to download files from a remote server, something like:

$file = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'http://www.server.com/filename.mp3'
+);
[download]

The last 128 bytes of an mp3 contain information about the file such as length, artist, song, etc. I want to download only the last 128 bytes so I can get to this information and store it in a mysql database.

So I guess my question is, what do I replace that line of code with so it only gets the last 128 bytes?

RFC2068 (HTTP/1.1) describes a partial-content protocol. If a response comes back with "Accept-Ranges: bytes" then you may ask for "Range: bytes=-128" in a request, and get just the last 128 bytes. That'd be like this:

my $url = "http://www.server.com/filename.mp3";
use LWP::UserAgent;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
my $response = $ua->simple_request(GET $url, Range => 'bytes=-128');
if ($response->is_success) {
  print "last 128 bytes is: ", substr($response->content, -128), "\n";
  print "(although entire content was retrieved)\n" if length ($respon
+se->content) > 128;
}
[download]

Note that if the range request is not honored, you'll get back the entire content instead. If you wanted, you can probe first to see if the "Accept-ranges" header is in the response for that particular URL.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

HTTP does not have a facility like FTP's RESTORE afaik. I think you'll have to get the whole thing.

What rpc says ... if you are on good terms with the people running the server, you might ask them kindly could they do this indexing themselves, and make the mp3 tags available to you. Otherwise, you're going to have to grab the whole thing.

Update Looky how tye's answer was the one I ended up suggesting =)

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor