NAME
    CPAN::WAIT - adds commands to search a WAIT4CPAN server to the CPAN
    `shell()'

SYNOPSIS
      perl -MCPAN -e shell
      > wq au=wall
      > wr 3
      > wd 3
      > wl 20
      > wh
      > wh wq

DESCRIPTION
    CPAN::WAIT adds some comands to the CPAN `shell()' to perform searches
    on a WAIT server. It connects to a WAIT server using a simple protocoll
    resembling NNTP as described in RFC977. It uses the WAIT::Client module
    to handle this connection. This in turn inherits from Net::NNTP from the
    libnet package. So you need Net::NNTP to use this module.

    If no direct connection to the WAIT server is possible, the modules
    tries to connect via your HTTP proxy (as given by the CPAN
    configuration). Be warned though that the emulation of the stateful
    protocol via HTTP is slow.

    The variable `CPAN::WAIT::TIMEOUT' specifies the number of seconds to
    wait for an answer from the server. The default is 20. You may want to
    set it to some larger value if you have a slow connection.

    The commands available are:

    wh [command]
        Displays a short help message if called without arguments. If you
        provide the name of another command you will get more information on
        this command if available. Currently only wq will be explained.

    wl *count*
        Limit the number of hits returned in a search to *count*. The limit
        usually is set ot 10 of you don't set it.

    wq *query*
        Send a query to the server.

        Here are some query examples:

          information retrieval               free text query 
          information or retrieval            same as above 
          des=information retrieval           `information' must be in the description 
          des=(information retrieval)         one of them in description 
          des=(information or retrieval)      same as above 
          des=(information and retrieval)     both of them in description 
          des=(information not retrieval)     `information' in description and
                                              `retrieval' not in description 
          des=(information system*)           wild-card search
          au=ilia                             author names may be misspelled

        You can build arbitary boolean combination of the above examples.
        Field names may be abbreviated. For further information see
        http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/CPAN

        The result should look like this:

          wq au=wall

           1 8.039 a2p - Awk to Perl translator 
           2 8.039 s2p - Sed to Perl translator 
           3 8.039 perlipc - Perl interprocess communication (signals, fifos, pipes, safe subprocesses, sockets, and semaphores) 
           4 8.039 ExtUtils::DynaGlue - Methods for generating Perl extension files 
           5 8.039 h2xs - convert .h C header files to Perl extensions 
           6 8.039 Sys::Syslog, openlog, closelog, setlogmask, syslog - Perl interface to the UNIX syslog(3) calls 
           7 8.039 h2ph - convert .h C header files to .ph Perl header files 
           8 8.039 Shell - run shell commands transparently within perl 
           9 8.039 pl2pm - Rough tool to translate Perl4 .pl files to Perl5 .pm modules. 
          10 8.039 perlpod - plain old documentation 

    wr *hit-number*
        Display the Record of hit number *hit-number*:

          wr 1
  
          source          authors/id/CHIPS/perl5.003_24.tar.gz
          headline        a2p - Awk to Perl translator 
          size            5643
          docid           data/perl/x2p/a2p.pod

    wd *hit-number*
        Fetches the full text from the server and runs perlpod on it. Make
        sure that you have perlpod in your path. Also check if your perlpod
        version can handle absolute pathes. Some older versions ironically
        do not find a document if the full patch is given on the command
        line.

AUTHOR
    Ulrich Pfeifer <pfeifer@ls6.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>

