[gentoo-user] OT: a script involving an IRC connection

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I want to write a script that I'll run on my server & which will  
connect to an IRC host and send a message to me if I'm logged on  
there. It can then disconnect from the server (or just plain drop the  
connection).

Any suggestions as to how to achieve this?

I'm reasonably proficient in Bash.

I think IRC protocol is fairly texty, so maybe I could use `expect` <http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/56066 
 > to automate this. ??
(Is the correct package dev-tcltk/expect?)

But I believe I've been given to understand in the past that use of  
`expect` is bad practice.
What if it doesn't receive the result it expects?

I believe Perl has some pretty good modules for interacting with IRC.
Would this be a good opportunity to learn Perl?
I'd rather do this the simplest way possible (that still wossisnames  
best practices).

I think a full-blown eggdrop bot would be overkill for this simple task.
But I also wondered if it might be possible to call irissi with a  
scripted set of '\server host.foo.co \nick my_messenger \msg nick  
"Your message here"' commands?

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Stroller.