# Crypt::Libcrypt

Provide a simple Perl 6 binding to POSIX crypt(3) function

## Description

This is a binding to the crypt() function that is typically defined in
libcrypt on most Unix-like systems or those providing a POSIX API.

There is a single exported subroutine crypt() that perform a one-way
encryption of the supplied plain text, with the provided "salt".  Depending
on the implementation on your system, the structure of the salt may influence
the algorithm that is used to perform the encryption.  The default will
probably be the DES algorithm that was traditionally used to encrypt 
passwords on a Unix system.

Because this is intended primarily for the encryption of passwords and is
"one way" (i.e. there is no mechanism to "decrypt" the crypt text,) it is
not suitable for general purpose encryption. 

In order to check whether a password entered by a user is correct it should
be encrypted using the stored encrypted password as the "salt" - the result
will be the same as the stored crypt text if the password is the same.

## Installation

Currently there is no dedicated test to determine whether your platform is
supported, the unit tests may simply fail horribly.

Assuming you have a working perl6 installation you should be able to
install this with *zef* :

    # From the source directory
   
    zef install .

    # Remote installation

    zef install Crypt::Libcrypt

*Notes for OSX* this can be used with libgcrypt on OSX (if you use brew, you can `brew install libgcrypt`)

## Support

Suggestions/patches are welcomed via github at:

https://github.com/jonathanstowe/Crypt-Libcrypt/issues

I'm not able to test on a wide variety of platforms so any help there would be 
appreciated. Also help with the documentation of which platforms support
which encryption algorithms is probably required.

## Licence

This is free software.

Please see the [LICENCE](LICENCE) file in the distribution

© Jonathan Stowe 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019