Perl for System Administration

How Perl Can Help

System administration work should use any and every computer language available when appropriate. So why single out Perl for a book?

The answer to this question harkens back the to the very nature of system administration. Rémy Evard, a colleague and friend, once described the job of a system administrator like this: “On one side, you have a set of resources: computers, networks, software, etc. On the other side, you have a set of users with needs and projects—people who want to get work done. Our job is to bring these two sets together in the most optimal way possible, translating between the world of vague human needs and the technical world when necessary.”

System administration is often a glue job; Perl is one of the best glue languages. Perl was being used for system administration work well before the World Wide Web came along with its voracious need for glue mechanisms.

Perl has several other things going for it from a system administration perspective:

• It is clearly an offspring of the various Unix shells and the C language, tools many system administrators are comfortable using.

• It is available on almost all modern operating systems. It does its best to present a consistent interface on each. This is important for multiplatform system administration.

• It has excellent tools for text manipulation, database access, and network programming, three of the mainstays of the profession.

• The core language can easily be extended through a carefully constructed module ...