Using
unpack here seems a bit awkward. Why not
use the builtins from
Socket and simplify?
use Socket;
my $hostname = 'yahoo.com';
print inet_ntoa(inet_aton($hostname)),"\n";
inet_aton converts from "ASCII" to "Network",
and as a bonus will resolve host names. The reverse,
inet_ntoa,
will do the inverse, though it will always give you a dotted IP
and not the name. To find that out, you will have to use
Net::DNS.
You will note that it puts out different answers on occasion,
though, because there are many possible addresses to choose
from, and they are selected at random, which is called
"Round Robin DNS".
As a side note, this code will die "Bad arg length..." if
fed an invalid or unresolvable address. This can be fixed
by splitting it into two steps and verifying that
inet_aton()
actually returned something.
