NAME

Gimp::Net - Communication module for the gimp-perl server.

SYNOPSIS

  use Gimp;

DESCRIPTION

For Gimp::Net (and thus commandline and remote scripts) to work, you first have to install the "Perl-Server" plugin somewhere where Gimp can find it (e.g in your .gimp/plug-ins/ directory). Usually this is done automatically while installing the Gimp extension. If you have a menu entry "Filters/Perl/Server" then it is probably installed.

The Perl-Server can either be started from the "Filters" menu in Gimp, or automatically when a perl script can't find a running Perl-Server, in which case it will start up its own copy of GIMP.

When started from within GIMP, the Perl-Server will create a unix domain socket to which local clients can connect. If an authorization password is given to the Perl-Server (by defining the environment variable "GIMP_HOST" before starting GIMP), it will also listen on a tcp port (default 10009). Since the password is transmitted in cleartext, using the Perl-Server over tcp effectively lowers the security of your network to the level of telnet. Even worse: the current Gimp::Net-protocol can be used for denial of service attacks, i.e. crashing the Perl-Server. There also *might* be buffer-overflows (although I do care a lot for these).

ENVIRONMENT

The environment variable "GIMP_HOST" specifies the default server to contact and/or the password to use. The syntax is [auth@][tcp/]hostname[:port] for tcp, [auth@]unix/local/socket/path for unix and spawn/ for a private GIMP instance. Examples are:

 www.yahoo.com               # just kidding ;)
 yahoo.com:11100             # non-standard port
 tcp/yahoo.com               # make sure it uses tcp
 authorize@tcp/yahoo.com:123 # full-fledged specification
 unix/tmp/unx                # use unix domain socket
 password@unix/tmp/test      # additionally use a password
 authorize@                  # specify authorization only
 spawn/                      # use a private gimp instance
 spawn/nodata                # pass --no-data switch
 spawn/gui                   # don't pass -n switch

CALLBACKS

Gimp::on_net($callback): $callback is called after we have succesfully connected to the server. Do your dirty work in this function, or see Gimp::Fu for a better solution.

FUNCTIONS

server_wait(): waits for a spawned GIMP process to exit. Calls "croak" if none defined.
server_quit(): sends the perl server a quit command.
get_connection(): return a connection id which uniquely identifies the current connection.
set_connection(conn_id): set the connection to use on subsequent commands. "conn_id" is the connection id as returned by get_connection().

AUTHOR

Marc Lehmann <pcg@goof.com>