Allan Wolfe – Software Languages

Technology: Perl - The Swiss Army Knife for the Administrator

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Eventually, the administrator will need to take a pile of text oriented data and “dice and mince” it in order to evaluate it or format it into a simple report. Shell scripting is a bit crude, but handles dicing up single lines of output from some command and culling out information in order to use it in some other form.

Perl is an excellent “Swiss Army Knife” of the script oriented languages. It shines when you have the need for decomposing unstructured data in order to make sense of it and report on it. This is my first tool to go to for collapsing a collection of related data within groups of collections (e.g. parsing through LDIF or XML formatted data).

Perl is an evolving language though very mature that is still well supported. Object orientation is rather crude and a backport somewhere in version 4 or 5 though a foundational design feature in version 6. “Moose” is a package that was developed to simplify the usage of the klunky perl object orientation though version 6 (aka “Raku”) has been release and will likely deprecate “Moose”.

Perl is modular, it is highly and easily extendible. There is a very rich ecosystem at CPAN.org that actively supports packages that extend the base functional capability of Perl. The downside when comparing Perl with other robust scripting languages, is how it lags behind in the packages incorporated into the base installation that support modern needs.

My Experience

I’ve worked with Perl version 5 for a lot of years for performing data mincing operations. Most significantly I’ve interfaced with LDAP to extract directory information or used it to traverse a file system tree to perform a listing that summerize how much data is stored at each descending level with an overall summary at the top level.

I experimented with using the multi-threaded capability but found it didn’t yield much of a time saver when compared to a single thread run over the same data. It was likely a contention issue on the CPU, though it was thread ready.

Here are some other articles on Perl subjects:

Technology: Python

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

Having programming experience that spans 20+ years, I was watching the popularity rise for Python. Already being proficient in other versatile script oriented languages that also includes some archaic UI library integrations, why should I bother with placing Python in my arsenal? I could see that those whose experience base in the C oriented languages could to rapidly learn a C-like language such as Python without requiring compilation before execution. I dug in to get a feel for the language and discern how it differentiates with the other languages I already learned.

[more articles comming in this subject area.]

Technology: Shell Scripting

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The “Shell” is the easiest of “languages” (if one could call it that) to learn. As a staple in adminstering an OS, it is a requirement for the administrator to be able to read and code shell scripts as it is the utility most used for OS installation and configuration as well as for application installation. There are several shells available on any operating system. The shell is a basic command that is executed when a user logs into a system. The shell is the mechanism that provides an “environment” that other commands or applications are executed during a user session.

Here are some articles that discuss the two basic shell types: