Creating An Eliza IRC Bot: Using the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

The Perl community is one of the most well-established demonstrations of the
Open Source Software movement. Many people that have benefited from Perl’s
openness have in turn contributed libraries and scripts back to the public for
others to use. The collective contributions to the Perl community have been
organized into the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, known more commonly as the
CPAN.

Randal Schwartz

Tuesday, June 15th, 1999

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The Perl community is one of the most well-established demonstrations of the Open Source Software movement. Many people that have benefited from Perl’s openness have in turn contributed libraries and scripts back to the public for others to use. The collective contributions to the Perl community have been organized into the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, known more commonly as the CPAN.

The CPAN is not a single machine, but actually over 100 machines holding more than 750 MB of cool stuff, available for your access via anonymous FTP or, in a few cases, HTTP. They all mirror off the master site in Finland at various intervals, usually not exceeding four to eight hours, so it’s usually safe to use the CPAN archive nearest to you. If you’re in the US, visit http://www.cpan.org. If that site is down (which it occasionally is),or you’re somewhere else in the world, try http://www.perl.com/CPAN/, which should send you to an up-and-running site that is close to you.

Once you get to the CPAN archive, you’ll find all sorts of useful things, including the latest release of Perl for UNIX and other operating systems. In particular, you’ll find hundreds of pre-written and tested Perl modules to handle many common tasks.

Let’s look at two of those modules and how they might be used together in an interesting way. The Net::IRC module provides support for Perl to handle the Internet Relay Chat protocol. With this module, you can write an…

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