Perl for System Administration

What You Need

To get the most of this book, you will need some technical background and some resources at hand. Let’s start with the background first:

You’ll need to know some Perl

There isn’t enough room in this book to provide the basics of the Perl language, so you need to seek that elsewhere before working through this material. Once you have learned the material in a book like Learning Perl, by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen (O’Reilly), or Learning Perl on Win32 Systems, by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen (O’Reilly), you should be in good shape to approach the code in this book.

You’ll need to know the basics of your operating system(s)

This book assumes that you have some facility with the operating system or systems you plan to administer. You’ll need to know how to get around in that OS, run commands, find documentation, etc. Background information on the more complex frameworks built into the OS (e.g., WMI on Windows 2000 or SNMP) is provided.

You may need to know the specifics of your operating system(s)

I make an attempt to describe the differences between the major operating systems as we encounter them, but I can’t cover all of the intra-OS differences. In particular, every variant of Unix is a little different from all of the others. As a result, you may need to find OS-specific information and roll with the punches should the information be different than what is described here.

For technical resources, you will need just two things: