Perl Is a Gem - One Liners and Programs

During my years as a Unix Systems Administrator and Quality Assurance Engineer, one of the most indispensable tools in my Unix tool box has been Perl. A Perl "power programmer" I am not, though almost daily I find new ways to incorporate simple (and sometimes not so simple) Perl logic into my work, which results in increased productivity and efficiency.

The following article was written not to teach Perl to the uninitiated, but rather to scratch the surface of demonstrating some of the power, flexability, and possibilities of Perl as it relates to:

1. System administrators utilizing one-liners
2. System administrators writing Perl programs for their company's end users.

Generally, over the years, Perl has been incorporated into my work in three forms:

1. Perl standalone one-liners on the shell (bash) commandline ("standalone" meaning that data is not being piped to or from Perl)
2. One-liners on the shell (bash) command-line that include Perl plus other Unix utilities (data is being piped either to or from Perl)
3. Perl programs written for company non-root users