Grabbing Information

[BenRussell]

I want to be able to grab information off of another server and be able to see the information (public information). For instance, I want to be able to see information about a person in an online text based game (planetarion.com exactly). How would I grab information? Not necessarily just planetarion.com, but any server? - Ben Russell
- President of Intracor Technologies (

http://intracor.hypermart.net)

 

[stillflame]

will this work? (from 'man finger'):

FINGER(1) UNIX Reference Manual FINGER(1)

NAME
finger - user information lookup program

SYNOPSIS
finger [-lmsp] [user ...] [user@host ...]

DESCRIPTION
The finger displays information about the system users.

"If you think you're too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a closed tent with a mosquito."

 

[BenRussell]

Im not sure what it does?
Im on a Windows OS. - Ben Russell
- President of Intracor Technologies (

http://intracor.hypermart.net)

 

[BenRussell]

Like what I want is, say "somewebsite.com" contains peoples first names and last names (this is just an example). Well, you know the persons first name, but you want the script to access "somewebsite.com" to find out their last name and print out that output. How would you do this? - Ben Russell
- President of Intracor Technologies (

http://intracor.hypermart.net)

 

[stillflame]

well, how is the information stored on the server in question? if the computer has users, and the person you want to look up is logged in, you can use finger them. here's a page i found on a google.com search:

http://home.winarchives.com/workstation/finger.html

but you'll want to be able to do it from perl, so you can use Net::Finger, which has info on how to use it in it's perldoc pages.
however, if the server does not allow fingering, or if the data is accessed some other way, you'll just have to emulate that from within perl. if it's on a web page, you can use LWP. if it's in a file that you can access and download with ftp, use Net::FTP... simple solution is to outline the exact path you take to get that information normally, then do that from within perl using various modules.
i'm not sure any of this is exactly what you need, but i hope it helps some. "If you think you're too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a closed tent with a mosquito."