use Perl

So I'm a freak, and I still use Pine for reading my email. Even weirder, I like to run Pine directly on the server in question, because it's way faster than using Imap. However, this is a little annoying when I want to look at some sort of attachment like a PDF or image, because I need to view it on the machine running my gui.

I wrote this little script to enable this, and it works well:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
use File::Temp qw(tempfile);
 
my ( $fh, $filename ) = tempfile();
 
print $fh $_ while <>;
 
seek $fh, 0, 0;
 
my $remote_host = ( split / /, $ENV{SSH_CONNECTION} )[0];
system( 'scp', $filename, $remote_host . ':' . $filename );
system( 'ssh', $remote_host, 'DISPLAY=:0.0 gnome-open ' . $filename );

The fact that gnome-open just does the right thing makes this all very simple.

However, I just now realized that this won't work when I am connecting from a machine behind NAT. I think the trick might be to always connect to the remote machine with a reverse tunnel, and take advantage of that to make things work.