This month we feature several practical Perl programs contributed by Patrick Ryan .

I'm contributing several Perl scripts written for our system. I have abandoned the Bourne shell , awk , and sed , converting completely to Perl for all script programming. At its little heart, Perl is a fantastic tool for manipulating text. As a bonus, it has access to most of the C library and system calls. Perl is about as close as you can get to interpreted C.

I wrote mos t of these scripts as exercises for myself when I was learning Perl. As such, they are not the best designed programs I've ever written. Each one, however, demonstrates some useful functionality of Perl in a reasonably concise manner.

Note that the pnews network program makes use of the Perl 5 "use" keyword. This code is safely nestled inside some version test logic and an eval statement. These programs should work under either Perl4 or Perl5.

Some time ago, I wrote the ``Introduction to Perl'' document, which was kindly converted to HTML and made available on the Web by Neil Bowers.

Editor's Note: Here are brief descriptions of each Perl tool. Even if you aren't interested in the tool itself, the programs provide examples of well-crafted Perl.

edcron : Edit a user's cron -configuration file.

The cron daemon executes specified commands at specified dates and times. The crontab command is supplied so a user can list or install a configuration file used by the cron daemon. Newer crontab versions recognize the -e option to invoke a visual editor, generally vi , to let the user update the configuration file. However, pre-SVR4 versions of crontab did not recognize this option so users had to perform several error-prone steps to update the configuration file.

The edcron Perl program lets the user update their cron -configuration file on any system with the crontab command, whether or not it recognizes the -e option. Briefly, here's how it works: first edcron runs crontab -l to list the configuration file, storing the output in a temporary file. An editor is invoked to update the contents of the temporary file. The vi editor is employed unless the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables specify an alternate editor. Finally, crontab is invoked to install the edited temporary file as the cron -configuration file for the user who invoked edcron .

kp : Kill selected processes.

Occasionally, it is necessary to kill all the processes owned by a certain user or all processes identified by a common pattern. My "process killer" ( kp ) program traverses the output from ps . As it goes along, kp looks for certain patterns in the output and kills processes that it recognizes. The invocation syntax is:
kp [ -n ] [ - signal-number ] pattern1 [ pattern2 ...]

Here, the argum ents are:

-n

The "not really" mode, that is, don't actually kill processes, just report processes that would have been killed.

- signal-number

Here, signal-number is a integer representing a signal. The default is 1 (SIGHUP). To send a SIGKILL, for instance, you would specify kp -9 .

pattern

After the command-line options, one or more regular expressions can be specified to identify the desired processes. Remember to quote any expressions that contain characters special to the shell, such as ()*|$!^&

Here are some examples:

Kill all processes owned by user bob :

# kp bob

Send a SIGKILL to all daemon processes:

# kp -9 '*d$'

View, but don't really kill ryan's processes:

# kp -n ryan

Caveat: Because the ps output format often va ries from system to system--that is, the number of output columns and their ordering is not standardized--you may need to "tweak" kp for your system.

pgrep : A Perl "grep" program.

Perl has some sweet extensions to the regular expression syntax used by grep . My pgrep program is a quick-and-dirty implementation with Perl of pattern matching that gives you access to Perl's complete regular expression capabilities. I find Perl's word boundary matching feature ( \b ) especially useful.

The syntax is simply:

pgrep pattern [ file1 [ file2 ...]]

Some usage examples:

Display all lines in gh.c containing "printf" pattern:

% 
pgrep printf gh.c

gh.c: fprintf(stderr,
gh.c: fprintf(stderr,"bad address: %s\n",h);
gh.c:
printf("%s %s ", ip, host->h_name);
gh.c: printf("%s ", *s);
gh.c: printf("\n");
gh.c: fprintf(stderr,"%s:",msg);
gh.c: fprintf(stderr,"HOST_NOT_FOUND\n");
% []

Only display calls to "printf," not "fprintf":

% 
pgrep '/\bprintf\b/' gh.c

gh.c: printf("%s %s ", ip, host->h_name);
gh.c: printf("%s ", *s);
gh.c: printf("\n");

Perform a case-insensitive search on the same file (analogous to " grep -i "):

% 
pgrep /host/i gh.c

gh.c: * get host info
gh.c: struct hostent
gh.c: *host;
gh.c: for (s = host->h_aliases; *s; ++s)
gh.c: case HOST_NOT_FOUND :
gh.c: fprintf(stderr,"HOST_NOT_FOUND\n");

Note : The surrounding slashes in the regular expression argument are optional.

pnews : Simple news posting client that uses the NNTP protocol.

I wrote this utility as an exercise in Perl networking.

The invocation arguments are:

-h host

Specify NNTP posting host. Otherwise, the default host specified by the $NNTPSERVER environment variable is used.

-s subject

Set message subject. If not specified, the program will prompt for a subject.

-d

Enable debugging output

-t command

For testing purposes, send an NNTP command to your server, and display the result.

A few examples:

To post a message:

% pnews

The program will prompt you for newsgroups and a subject, invoke your favorite editor, and post the message.

To test your server:

% pnews -t help

Send a "help" message to your NNTP daemon and print the result.

tarls : List contents of an archive c reated by the UNIX tar command.

I developed tarls to demonstrate the use of the Perl unpack function. The tar -archive format is one of the few widely accepted file formats in the UNIX system world. The record structure can usually be found in /usr/include/tar.h . The tarls program simply lists the contents of a tar file.

The command-line syntax is:

tarls tar-format-file

Here's an example displaying the contents of the /tmp/cfiles.tar file:

% 
tarls /tmp/cfiles.tar

ryan/ims 786 Mon Aug 29 15:26:19 EDT 1994 touchport.c
ryan/ims 4982 Thu Dec 15 14:28:10 EST 1994 utmpdmp.c
ryan/ims 989 Thu Dec 8 15:37:57 EST 1994 daemon_start.c
% []

which : Perl version of the UNIX system which program.

For some reason unknown to me, many UNIX systems vendors do not include the helpful which program with their operating systems. The UNIX which command looks for a specified program along the command-search path specified in the C shell's .cshrc file, and displays its path name. (It also expands command alias definitions). When I came across a UNIX-based platform that didn't have this useful utility-- UNICOS, to be exact--I cobbled up this version with Perl.

Unlike the distributed version, my version searches the list of directories in the PATH environment variable. In particular, the value of the Perl $ENV{PATH} is split into fields and each resulting directory examined for the specified command-line argument. Like the distributed version, my version also displays the alias expansion for the specified argument.

Some usage exampl es:

% 
which cc

/usr/ucb/cc
/opt/SUNWspro/SC2.0.1/cc
% []
% 
which pd

pd aliased to 'pushd'
% []