Practical Perl Tools: Off the Charts

I recently had the pleasure of giving another invited talk to the LISA 2016 audience. Part of preparing that talk involved performing some basic forensics on a machine that I could no longer directly access. I wanted to explore how its file systems had changed over time. I like pretty pictures, so my first goal was to attempt to draw a diagram that represented this evolution. In this column, we’ll take a look at the code I wrote to achieve this. Just a warning up front: there are a number of moving parts for the approach I took (not all of which are Perl), but I’ll do my best to explain all of the plates that are being spun.