> From: Ashish Sheth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [twincling] Re: TSM - PERL Programming Language - Sat - 25th
> November - 5pm at CommVault
> Sent: 23 Nov '06 15:42
>
> Hello,
> I want to know why Perl is so much popular for system administratio.
> what features and packages should I learn for the same ?
> cheers
> Ashish.
>
Hello Ashish:
System administration involves automation of repetitive tasks.
Shell is the rudimentary interface used in most cases.
PERL being a full fledged language makes it easy to write
scripts which can run uniformly on most *NIX, *BSD and Linux systems.
Two areas where PERL really shines as you use it for progressively
involved tasks are -
1. PERLFUNC
perl built-in functions are very powerful and well supported by operators.
A very good summary is available at
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfunc.html
2. REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Regular expressions, commonly known as "RegEx" are a set of key
combinations
(basically it is a string) that describes or matches a set of strings,
according
to certain syntax rules.
This is very useful for pattern matching, logs analysis (/var/log) for
various applications.
A good overview is available at
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html
You would be happy to know that there is a complete book
'PERL for System Administration'
by David N. Blank Edelman.
The book is available at http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/sysadmin/
There is a good amount of discussion on the type of scripts that need to be
written
and also some packages.
To keep up with the latest packages and developments,
please take a look at http://www.perl.com/
Hope this gets you started.
thanks
Saifi.
