Perl Socket Test

I’ve had to make a decent number of scripts lately to do just a quick test to see if a port is open on large list of servers. Instead of writing a shell script and using telnet for this (which can be inconvenient), Perl’s IO::Socket socket module works extremely well and is very simple! If I just need to do a quick test to see if a service is listening on port 80, I could just do the below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my $host = 192.168.1.1;
my $port = 80;
my $socket = new IO::Socket::INET ( PeerAddr => $host,
                                                        PeerPort  => $port,
                                                        Proto      => ‘tcp’,
                                                        Timeout  => ‘2’,
                                                      );
if ($socket) {
    print “Connected to $host!\n”;
    close ($socket);
}
else {
    print “Cannot connect to $host!\n”;
}

That’s it! You can easily feed it a list from a file with a while loop or from an argument.