Why Perl here ?

[Al Piszcz 'peesh']

>  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.
> 

	Infrequent, "?" maybe but very a very useful feature
	which can be used to serve different compartments
	of applications from a single UNIX machine.


> From owner-vnc-list "at" orl.co.uk Fri Mar 27 07:18:12 1998
> From: alexandre.ferrieux "at" cnet.francetelecom.fr
> Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 11:55:31 +0100
> To: budzynsk "at" cclan.fuw.edu.pl
> CC: vnc-list "at" orl.co.uk
> Subject: Why Perl here ?
> X-Status: 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 
-  ___________.___________________.___________________._______________________
- < Al Piszcz | apiszcz "at" mitre.org | MITRE Corporation | 703.883.7124/3308 FAX >