Why Perl here ?

[alexandre.ferrieux@cnet.francetelecom.fr]

Robert Budzynski wrote:

> I also had to install Xvnc on a machine that had no perl, and that I
> did not  have the root  password for.  Fortunately, in  that case it
> took me only one  day to get the admin to make perl available on the
> box.

 A good thing would be to state more clearly in the documentation that
vncserver is just a helper, and using  Xvnc alone is  just as easy, so
that people without Perl don't go into  the installation of  something
really not needed.

> it's  the  socket  functions  that  are  being  used  to  check  for
> availability  of  tcp ports.  Although one  could  perhaps  write  a
> slightly less robust shell-script replacement for vncserver,  upping
> the display number by 1 after each failure.

 Good point.   On a unix box, it is really infrequent to have multiple
displays installed. Worse, these may be  stale TCP binds from previous
invocations of  Xvnc which did not exit fully  !   So I think 'hiding'
the  problem of finding  a  free  X port (above 6000) is a really  bad
idea.

 In  any  case, as an exercise, we can start a thread on this isolated
problem of finding free TCP port with vanilla shells. We know  already
two possibilities:
	
	 Robert> upping the [port number] by 1 after each failure.
	 Alex>   using netstat

	 ... any other suggestions ?

-Alex