Perl for System Administration

Preface

Perl is a powerful programming language that grew out of the traditional system administration toolbox. Over the years it has adapted and expanded to meet the challenges of new operating systems and new tasks. Until now, however, no book has recognized this deep history by concentrating solely on using Perl for system administration.

If you know a little Perl, and you need to perform system administration tasks, this is the right book for you. Readers with varying levels of both Perl programming experience and system administration experience will all find something of use within these pages.

How This Book Is Structured

Each chapter in this book addresses a different system administration domain and ends with a list of the Perl modules used in that chapter and references to facilitate deeper exploration of the information presented. The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 1

The introduction describes the material covered by the book in more detail, how it will serve you, and what you need to get the most from it. The material in this book is powerful and meant to be used by powerful people (e.g., Unix superusers and NT/2000 administrators). The introduction provides some important guidelines to help you write more secure Perl programs.

Chapter 2

This chapter is about keeping multiplatform filesystems tidy and properly used. We start by looking at the salient differences between the native filesystems for each operating system. We then explore the process of walking or traversing ...