Systems Administration

Although Perl was initially developed for processing textual files, it has been used by systems administrators in the Unix environment from its early days. The Unix operating system has no standards. With the release of OS X based on BSD Unix for Macintosh computers, Unix is likely to gain substantial additional followers and users as well. Different versions of Unix are produced and sold by various corporations. To fulfill Unix systems administration tasks, such as creating logins for new users, allocating resources and maintaining a secure environment for all users, and installing and uninstalling software packages, systems administrators primarily use programming languages called shells. There are many different shells and they work differently on different versions of Unix. The shell programs or scripts as they are called, are not always portable from one version of Unix to another. This is where Perl comes as a blessing. Because Perl has been ported to all versions of Unix and Perl has many capabilities that systems administrators desire and use, Perl scripts have started taking the place of shell scripts for many systems administrators. Perl has also been ported to various flavors of the Windows operating system. As a result, Perl is finding widespread use in systems administration tasks in non-Unix environments also.