Vol. I · Fri, 2 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glass
Plate XCI0x6502373BUNREAD
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Scanners›Family Unidentified›Species libwww-perl
Specimen file · The Feral Pit

libwww-perl

Margarita vetusta

What is libwww-perl?

Perl's classic web library. Often an old script still running somewhere, long after its author moved on. It is operated by Unknown and identifies itself as libwww-perl.

Temperament: venerable. Has been fetching pages since the nineties. Has not updated its outfit.

Operator
Unknown
Conservation status
Has not read the rules
First seen
Not yet
Last seen
Not yet
Visits today
0
This week
0
All time
0
Caught in the trap
Never
How to block libwww-perl ↓
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ libwww-perl/6.72

There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.

§ II.

How to block libwww-perl

libwww-perl does not read robots.txt, so a polite sign is wasted on it. Refuse it at your web server or firewall instead. User agents are easy to fake, so pair this with rate limiting.

nginx.conf
# robots.txt will not stop libwww-perl. Block it at the server.
# nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "libwww-perl") {
    return 403;
}

The same thing on Apache:

# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww-perl [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 1 / day
3 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h
robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:

Nothing on record in the last 30 days.

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Questions site owners ask

Does libwww-perl respect robots.txt?

We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.

Will blocking libwww-perl hurt my search rankings?

No. Nothing respectable will miss it.

How often does libwww-perl visit?

Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

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