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Learning Perl, 5th Edition
book

Learning Perl, 5th Edition

by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian d foy
June 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
352 pages
11h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Perl, 5th Edition

Networking and IPC

If there’s a way that programs on your machine can talk with others, Perl can probably do it. This section shows some common ways.

System V IPC

The standard functions for System V IPC (interprocess communication) are all supported by Perl, so you can use message queues, semaphores, and shared memory. Of course, an array in Perl isn’t stored in a chunk of memory in the same way[*] that an array is stored in C, so shared memory can’t share Perl data as-is. But there are modules that will translate data, so that you can pretend that your Perl data is in shared memory. See the perlfunc manpage and the perlipc module.

Sockets

Perl has full support for TCP/IP sockets, which means that you could write a web server in Perl, or a web browser, Usenet news server or client, finger daemon or client, FTP daemon or client, SMTP or POP or SOAP server or client, or either end of pretty much any other kind of protocol in use on the Internet. Of course, there’s no need to get into the low-level details yourself; there are modules available for all of the common protocols. For example, you can make a web server or client with the LWP module and one or two lines of additional code.[] The LWP module (actually, a tightly integrated set of modules that together implement nearly everything that happens on the Web) is also a great example of high-quality Perl code, if you’d like to copy from the best. For other protocols, search for a module with the protocol’s name.

[*] In fact, it would ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596520106Supplemental ContentErrata Page