debian man page for net::finger

Finger(3pm)						User Contributed Perl Documentation					       Finger(3pm)

NAME
       Net::Finger - a Perl implementation of a finger client.

SYNOPSIS
	 use Net::Finger;

	 # You can put the response in a scalar...
	 $response = finger('corbeau@execpc.com');
	 unless ($response) {
	     warn "Finger problem: $Net::Finger::error";
	 }

	 # ...or an array.
	 @lines = finger('corbeau@execpc.com', 1);

DESCRIPTION
       Net::Finger is a simple, straightforward implementation of a finger client in Perl -- so simple, in fact, that writing this documentation
       is almost unnecessary.

       This module has one automatically exported function, appropriately entitled "finger()". It takes two arguments:

       o   A username or email address to finger. (Yes, it does support the vaguely deprecated "user@host@host" syntax.) If you need to use a port
	   other than the default finger port(79), you can specify it like so: "username@hostname:port".

       o   (Optional) A boolean value for verbosity. True == verbose output. If you don't give it a value, it defaults to false. Actually, whether
	   this output will differ from the non-verbose version at all is up to the finger server.

       "finger()" is context-sensitive. If it's used in a scalar context, it will return the server's response in one large string. If it's used
       in an array context, it will return the response as a list, line by line. If an error of some sort occurs, it returns undef and puts a
       string describing the error into the package global variable $Net::Finger::error. If you'd like to see some excessively verbose output
       describing every step "finger()" takes while talking to the other server, put a true value in the variable $Net::Finger::debug.

       Here's a sample program that implements a very tiny, stripped-down finger(1):

	   #!/usr/bin/perl -w

	   use Net::Finger;
	   use Getopt::Std;
	   use vars qw($opt_l);

	   getopts('l');
	   $x = finger($ARGV[0], $opt_l);

	   if ($x) {
	       print $x;
	   } else {
	       warn "$0: error: $Net::Finger::error
";
	   }

BUGS
       o   Doesn't yet do non-blocking requests. (FITNR. Really.)

       o   Doesn't do local requests unless there's a finger server running on localhost.

       o   Contrary to the name's implications, this module involves no teledildonics.

AUTHOR
       Dennis Taylor, <corbeau@execpc.com>

SEE ALSO
       perl(1), finger(1), RFC 1288.

perl v5.8.8							    2001-11-02							       Finger(3pm)