# Perl And Serial I/O



## WhateverJoe (Feb 19, 2002)

I'm just now dabbing around in perl , making a few archiving scripts and administrative tools... but I'm working on a project that involves a little I/O... 

I do most of everything now on OS X boxes, but this project I'm thinking about using an Intel Box running Linux... Because Industrial equipment still uses 4-20 or serial style I/O.... And Figuring out how to get one of those KeySpan serial -> USB modules to work under OS X is just too much of a "Hair Pulling" experience......

So instead of the usual, two box setup I make... A windows box communicating with the equipment and then sending that data to the Unix/Mac OS X box for Data Storage and interfacing via postgree/mySQL and Apache/PHP .... I am trying to find out how to cram it all on one box... other than running a DBMS and Apache/PHP on the windows box <--- (Ewwww)

So to my question....      Under Linux/Darwin on intel... are there modules for perl or hacks using TCL that can read and write to a serial port ?

I've browsed around the CPAN, use.perl.org and other various sites.. but have yet to find anything much more than.... CGI development and what not...

(I imagine most will not even read this because the subject contains ... Serial... like ... what's that... right? )   <grin>


----------



## ThinkingDiff (Feb 21, 2002)

You should be able to access the serial devices by reading/writing to the /dev/XXX entries.  I don't know what they are name but the XXX is the name of ther serial port.  For example, the modem can usually be accessed via
 /dev/modem.


----------

