All my Perl questions!

[Insectoid]

So, I figured I'm the only one asking about Perl on this site, may as well put everything in one thread.

My current question is, how can I connect to my Hotmail address to send E-mails or delete spam automatically? Currently, I have,

code:

#!/usr/bin/perl $title = 'Test'; $to = "my_email@hotmail.com"; $from = "my_email@hotmail.com"; $subject = "Test"; open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");         print MAIL "To: $to\n";         print MAIL "From: $from\n";         print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";         print MAIL "TEST\n"; close (MAIL);

This doesn't return any errors, but won't send the mail (likely due to the absence of a password). Do I need to set up an e-mail server? How hard would that be?

[apomb]

you will need to install sendmail. are you running these programs from a linux command line?

[Insectoid]

I'm on mac (which is based on unix). I'm running these from the terminal (perl emailtest.pl). Is there a way to do this without sendmail?

[Tony]

You need a mailserver to send the actual email. If you don't want to run one locally, then you would need to connect to a remote one.

[Unforgiven]

There are many options on CPAN, but this may be of use to you.

[Insectoid]

Okay, new question. Does Perl support sending data to specific hardware IDs/addresses/pots/whatever those are called? I know the USB port has 3 4-digit IDs, one for inputting to the computer, one for outputting to the USB port, and one to interrupt the device. Can I send data directly to those locations, without using additional modules? Do 'nix OSes use the same hardware ID systems as Windows?

[wtd]

Perl has no specific syntactic support for those things, but the underlying implementation for Perl is C, and C can do those things, so you will find the ability to do them in Perl in a module.

[btiffin]

insectoid; Google Sys::PortIO see if that can float your boat. I can't speak as to have ever used it. Me and Perl have a history of not getting along. But I still try and be its friend from time to time.

On the OpenCOBOL project, a gentleman from Japan has coded up a cob_perl module and his sample is for accessing barcode readers. That will form a small, but critical part of the Open Source Point Of Sale system that we have dancing around our backburners.

Cheers

[Insectoid]

Great. More modules. Can somebody walk me through configuring the CPAN command line downloader on my mac? I tried, but it fails to connect to any of the mirrors.

EDIT: Btiffin, your module appears to be designed for Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Is it still compatible with mac?

EDIT 2: It only works with parallel, serial, and joystick ports. I would rather communicate with DVI, USB, and firewire.

[btiffin]

Sorry insectoid, no idea. I haven't had a Mac since my LC630 borked some 10 years ago.

Best of skill though. From what I've seen of your intelligent posts and good works, I have faith you'll get it figured and dancing before you know it.

Cheers

[gianni]

insectoid @ Wed Dec 10, 2008 7:06 pm wrote:

Great. More modules. Can somebody walk me through configuring the CPAN command line downloader on my mac? I tried, but it fails to connect to any of the mirrors.

EDIT: Btiffin, your module appears to be designed for Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Is it still compatible with mac?

EDIT 2: It only works with parallel, serial, and joystick ports. I would rather communicate with DVI, USB, and firewire.

DVI is a video port.

From what I understand, accessing USB/FW is much different than your standard COM ports. Dealing with USB actually requires dealing with whatever peripheral is connected/associated driver. As opposed to just sending raw data somewhere.

Also, if the module is BSD compatible it is more than likely OS X compatible, as OS X is mainly BSD-based.