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>