Network Programming with Perl

A Client Script for the Psychotherapist Server

Before we push onward with our discussion of forking servers, let's write a client that we can use to talk to the psychotherapist server. After all, we shouldn't have to be stuck with musty old telnet when we can use Perl! Seriously, though, this script illustrates the usefulness of sysread() and syswrite() for working with unbuffered byte streams.

At first, the gab2.pl script developed in Chapter 5 (Figure 5.8) would seem to fit the bill for the client side of the equation. But there's a problem. gab2.pl was designed for line-oriented communications, in which the server transmits complete lines terminated in CRLF. The psychotherapist server, however, is not entirely line oriented. For one thing, ...