For those preferring a higher-level interface to socket programming, the IO::Socket module provides an object-oriented approach. IO::Socket is included as part of the standard Perl distribution as of the 5.004 release. If you're running an earlier version of Perl, just fetch IO::Socket from
CPAN, where you'll also find find modules providing easy interfaces to the following systems:
DNS,
FTP, Ident
(RFC 931),
NIS and NISPlus,
NNTP, Ping,
POP3,
SMTP,
SNMP, SSLeay, Telnet, and Time--just to name a few.