libnet is a collection of Perl modules which provides a simple and consistent programming interface (API) to the client side of various protocols used in the internet community.

For details of each protocol please refer to the RFC. RFC's can be found a various places on the WEB, for a starting point look at:

http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Standards/RFCs/

The RFC implemented in this distribution are

Net::FTP        RFC959          File Transfer Protocol
Net::SMTP       RFC821          Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Net::Time       RFC867          Daytime Protocol
Net::Time       RFC868          Time Protocol
Net::NNTP       RFC977          Network News Transfer Protocol
Net::POP3       RFC1939         Post Office Protocol 3

AVAILABILITY

The latest version of libnet is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). To find a CPAN site near you see:

http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/libnet/

The subversion source repository can be browsed at

http://svn.goingon.net/viewvc/libnet/

If you have a subversion client, then you can checkout the latest code with

svn co http://svn.goingon.net/repos/libnet/trunk libnet

INSTALLATION

In order to use this package you will need Perl version 5.002 or better. You install libnet, as you would install any perl module library, by running these commands:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

If you want to install a private copy of libnet in your home directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with something like this command:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=~/perl

The Makefile.PL program will start out by checking your perl installation for a few packages that are recommended to be installed together with libnet. These packages should be available on CPAN (described above).

CONFIGURE

Normally when perl Makefile.PL is run it will run Configure which will ask some questions about your system. The results of these questions will be stored in a file called libnet.cfg which will be installed alongside the other perl modules in this distribution. The Makefile.PL will run Configure in an interactive mode unless these exists a file called libnet.cfg in the build directory.

If you are on a system which cannot run this script you can create an empty file to make Makefile.PL skip running Configure. If you want to keep your existing settings and not run interactivly the simple run

Configure -d

before running the Makefile.PL.

DOCUMENTATION

See ChangeLog for recent changes. POD style documentation is included in all modules and scripts. These are normally converted to manual pages and installed as part of the "make install" process. You should also be able to use the 'perldoc' utility to extract documentation from the module files directly.

DEMOS

The demos directory does contain a few demo scripts. These should be run from the top directory like

demos/smtp.self -user my-email-address -debug

However I do not guarantee these scripts to work.

SUPPORT

Questions about how to use this library should be directed to the comp.lang.perl.modules USENET Newsgroup. Bug reports and suggestions for improvements can be sent to me at <gbarr@pobox.com>.

Most of the modules in this library have an option to output a debug transcript to STDERR. When reporting bugs/problems please, if possible, include a transcript of a run.

COPYRIGHT

(C) 1996-2007 Graham Barr. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Share and Enjoy!