
                      Net::Telnet, version 3.01

    Copyright (c) 1997 Jay Rogers.  All rights reserved.  This program
    is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
    the same terms as Perl itself.


  What's In It For You
  --------------------

   .  You'd like to communicate with another host or device via a
      TELNET port and you'd like some specialized routines to help you
      login and do other interactive things.

   .  You're not familiar with sockets and you want a simple way to
      make client connections to TCP services.

   .  You want to be able to specify your own time-out while
      connecting, reading, and writing.

   .  You're communicating with an interactive program at the other
      end of some socket or pipe and you want to wait for certain
      patterns to appear.


  Archive Location
  ----------------

    .  In the CPAN directory: modules/by-module/Net/

    .  To find a CPAN site near you see http://cpan.perl.org/SITES.html


  Prerequisites
  -------------

    .  Perl Version 5.002 or later

    .  A Windows 95/NT machine requires Perl version 5.003_07 or later

    .  No other modules are required that don't already come with a
       standard distribution of Perl.


  Description
  -----------

    Net::Telnet allows you to make client connections to a TCP port
    and do network I/O, especially to a port using the TELNET
    protocol.  Simple I/O methods such as print, get, and getline are
    provided.  More sophisticated interactive features are provided
    because connecting to a TELNET port ultimately means communicating
    with a program designed for human interaction.  These interactive
    features include the ability to specify a timeout and to wait for
    patterns to appear in the input stream, such as the prompt from a
    shell.

    Here's an example that prints who's logged-on to the remote host
    sparky.  In addition to a username and password, you must also
    know the user's shell prompt, which for this example is bash$

        use Net::Telnet ();
        $t = new Net::Telnet (Timeout => 10,
                              Prompt => '/bash\$ $/');
        $t->open("sparky");
        $t->login($username, $passwd);
        @lines = $t->cmd("/usr/bin/who");
        print @lines;

    See the user documentation for more examples.

    This is an alpha version - meaning that the interface may change
    in future versions.  Contact me, Jay Rogers <jay@rgrs.com>, if you
    find any bugs or have suggestions for improvement.


  Documentation
  -------------

    User documentation in POD format is contained within the module
    source (i.e. the .pm file).  Installing using "make install"
    places this documentation in a man page in the perl library under
    the directory "man/man3".


  Installation
  ------------

    To install, cd to the directory containing the unpacked
    distribution and do one of the following:

    a.  Create a makefile by running Makefile.PL using the perl
        program into whose library you want to install and then run
        make three times:

            perl Makefile.PL
            make
            make test
            make install

    b.  To install into a private library, for example your home
        directory:

            perl Makefile.PL INSTALLSITELIB=$HOME/lib INSTALLMAN3DIR=$HOME/man
            make
            make test
            make pure_install

    c.  Alternatively, you can just copy or move Telnet.pm
        from the distribution into a directory named Net/ in the Perl
        library.  You can then manually build the documentation using
        pod2man or pod2html.

--
Jay Rogers
jay@rgrs.com
December 27, 1997
