Ruth Holloway, cPanel, Inc.
A lot of system administration tasks can be made easier with some “glue” code—and Perl is an excellent glue language, useful for many things. As its creator Larry Wall says, “when is the last time you used duct tape on a duct?”
In this session, attendees will learn a little about Perl, with a focus on its use in system administration. We’ll explore Perl’s mature infrastructure, step through the basics of creating Perl programs, and discuss use cases for system administration tools in Perl.
Ruth Holloway, cPanel, Inc.
Ruth Holloway got into system administration early in her 30-year career, and has spent at least part of her time ever since working to make it easier for herself, and for the people who follow her in the admin's seat. She has been a Perl developer for over 15 years, and currently works for cPanel in Houston, TX.
Ruth is a wife, mother, grandmother, writer, activist, technologist, and mommy to the cutest dog you'll ever meet.
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This content is available to:
author = {Ruth Holloway},
title = {30 Years of Making Lives Easier: Perl for System Administrators},
year = {2018},
address = {Nashville, TN},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
Download Training Materials (Attendees Only)System administrators on any platform will benefit most from this tutorial, but anyone wishing to learn about Perl and learn the basics of Perl development is welcome.
Attendees will go home with more information and resources about the Perl programming language, and be equipped to start developing solutions to their own pain points with Perl. The results of the interactive brainstorming session will be shared with all attendees at the completion of the session, which will provide ideas and direction for finding the resources that can be used to build new system administration tools.
Automation, Programming, Monitoring and Instrumentation
Students should be comfortable using their system's editor and command line, and it is best if they are comfortable with programming or reading code in some other language. Best results will be had for students with access to a system (which could be their laptop) with Perl already installed.