NAME

Net::addrinfo - interface to POSIX getaddrinfo(3) and related constants, structures and functions.

SYNOPSIS

use Net::addrinfo;
my $ainfo = getaddrinfo("www.marzot.net");

DESCRIPTION

This Perl module is designed to implement and export functionality related to the POSIX getaddrinfo(3) system call. The Net::addrinfo data object is provided with field name accsessor functions, similarly named to the the C data structure definition in netdb.h. The getaddrinfo(3), gai_strerror(3) calls, and related constants are exported.

The getaddrinfo() routine mimics the POSIX documented funtion (see system man page getaddrinfo(3)).

On success the getaddrinfo() will return an array of Net::addrinfo data objects.

In scalar context getaddrinfo() will return the first element from the Net::addrinfo array.

In case of error, a numeric error code is returned.

The error code may be passed to gai_strerror() to get a string representation of the error.

New Net::addrinfo objects may be created with the package constructor and any number (or none) of the fields may be specified.

flags => scalar integer
family => scalar integer (e.g., AF_INET,m AF_INET6, etc.)
socktype => scalar integer (e.g., SOCK_DGRAM, SOCK_STREAM, etc.)
protocol => scalar integer (e.g., IPPROTO_UDP, IPPROTO_TCP, etc.)
addrlen => scalar integer (can be computed by length($self->addr))
addr => packed bytes (e.g., $self->addr(inet_aton("192.168.1.1")); )

Flags may be set in the structure so that it may be used as a 'hint' parameter to the getaddrinfo() function. See exported @AI_FLAGS for list of acceptable constants.

(Note: a special scalar integer field, 'val_status', is provided in support of DNSSEC aware addrinfo results (see Net::DNS::SEC::Validator))

EXAMPLES

use Net::addrinfo;
use Socket qw(:all);
my $hint = new Net::addrinfo(flags => AI_CANONNAME,
                             family => AF_INET, 
                             socktype => SOCK_DGRAM);
my (@ainfo) = getaddrinfo("www.marzot.net", "http", $hint);
foreach $ainfo (@ainfo) {
   if (ref $ainfo eq 'Net::addrinfo') {
      print $ainfo->stringify(), "\n";
      print "addr = ", inet_ntoa($ainfo->addr), "\n";
      ...
      connect(SH, $ainfo->addr);
    } else {
       print "Error($ainfo):", gai_strerror($ainfo), "\n";
    }
}

NOTE

One should not rely on the internal representation of this class.

AUTHOR

G. S. Marzot (marz@users.sourceforge.net)

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2006 G. S. Marzot. All rights reserved.  This program
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.
Copyright (c) 2006-2008 SPARTA, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.  This program
is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.