Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Net::protoent

Returns information for an Internet protocol. Overrides the core getprotoent, getprotobyname, and getprotobynumber functions with object-oriented versions that return Net::protoent objects. The functions take a default second argument of tcp. The objects have methods that return the fields of the same name from the protoent structure in netdb.h:

Field	Description
aliases	List of aliases
name	Name of host
proto	Protocol

You can access the structure fields with the methods or by importing the fields into your namespace with the :FIELDS import tag and accessing them by prepending p_ to the field name:

$proto_obj->name(  )
$p_name