Description: Recently, I have had the pleasure of getting knee deep into various aspects of Email. One of the things that I consistantly found myself wanting to do was to parse through it. I know the best way to do this is to connect to the IMAP server and download the messages. The best way…

Description: Sys::Hostname is a relatively small, but very useful module. Just as the module name describes, it gets your system’s hostname. To paraphrase the module’s POD documentation, it will try every conceivable way to get the hostname of the current machine. CPAN: Sys::Hostname Example: The one and only use for this module. # Always be…

Description: When taking user input through any number of forms, there could be characters that you aren’t expecting. This is exactly what HTML::Entities was designed to handle. When getting the user input, it converts it into a form that can help in mitigating certain types of web based scripting attacks. CPAN: HTML::Entities Example 1: The…

Description: This is probably one of the modules that I use most frequently. I commonly write reporting and statistic generating scripts. When the data is finished being crunched, I then dump it into a scalar and send it off in an email. This is the module that does my dirty work for me. CPAN: Mail::Sender…

Description: When I need to interact with the raw IO of telnetting to a port or creating a hand rolled implementation of my own service, I use IO::Socket. My most recent endeavor was for a need to check weather or not services were running on a regular basis. I will show some excepts from the…