$ cat ip.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

print “Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\n\n”;
print “$ENV{‘REMOTE_ADDR’}”;
print “\n\n”;

It’s useful to have this script (or something similar) because then you can use the output in bash scripts without tons of sanitization/parsing

wget -q -O – http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp
# basically the automation page
# that someone else mentioned in an earlier comment
# saves bandwidth!

For sometime, there was actually a complaint message posted on WhatIsMyIP.com’s website … it linked to the automation page and requested that scripts have a reasonable hit frequency (NOT every two minutes or less … more like 30 minutes to an hour or more). I know for example my dynamic IP at home does not change for months and the DDNS script on my router does not try to update my IP on DynDNS all that often either.

People need to think before they code (even pseudocode first) and test the code … and when networks are involved use tcpdump or Wireshark to verify how much network traffic you are creating!