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…

Description: Consistantly writing programs that either act as daemons or take a long time to run depending on the input, I find it necessary to track weather or not they are still running. Lots of programs do this and its generally called state or status tracking. One of the most common ways to do this…