Paranoia (revisited)

[Alan Stewart]

On 4 Nov 99, at 19:46, Joel Fentin wrote:

> ~sdpm~
> Nobody answered. 
> 
> My current thinking is that the paranoia message came from the
> fact that the crypt function relies on some UNIX command, but
> unavailable in DOS/Windoz.
> 
The crypt function is a built-in Perl function that does the same thing that a Unix command 
does. Some people think that any crypto function is a crypto-munition and covered by US export 
laws. In order to make their Perl stuff exportable outside the US, they leave crypt out. This is 
bogus for several reasons. This paranoia has been propagated thru all the Win32 
implementations (and maybe others).

All or most of the Perl diagnostic messages are elaborated in perldiag.pod (found in your lib/Pod 
dir). The following para is from there:

    =item The crypt() function is unimplemented due to excessive paranoia

   (F) Configure couldn't find the crypt() function on your machine,
   probably because your vendor didn't supply it, probably because they
   think the U.S. Government thinks it's a secret, or at least that they
   will continue to pretend that it is.  And if you quote me on that, I
   will deny it.

In any case, there is a "replacement" module available on CPAN (and maybe at ActiveState):
  Crypt-UnixCrypt-1_0_tar.gz
that is portable Perl-only code. Since it is small, I will attach it here.

If you are not prepared to Make/Install, just create a lib/Crypt dir and copy the UnixCrypt.pm 
there. At the beginning of any script that needs crypt( ), include the lines:

  BEGIN { $Crypt::UnixCrpyt::OVERRIDE_BUILTIN = 1 }
  use Crypt::UnixCrypt;

and all will be well.


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Alan Stewart          )-[]-(           Electronics Engineer
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     Date:  4 Nov 1999, 19:12
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