‘Tis the Season: The Perl Advent Calendar

I’ve talked about Perl quite a lot in recent columns, largely because it’s
still an incredibly useful language for sys admins. On a seasonal Perl note,
the Perl Advent Calendar has been
going since 2000, and it provides a Useful Perl Module for every day between the
1st and the 24th of December. Less chocolatey than your average advent
calendar, but possibly more useful.

Tip of the Trade: Less chocolatey, but more useful. Since 2000, the Perl Advent Calendar has been providing a useful Perl module each day from December 1 through Christmas Eve.

Some of the useful ones so far in this year’s calendar:

• local::lib for
  managing local library installs. Best practice is not to install modules
  from CPAN as root; instead, you can use the system perl and keep your own
  CPAN directory under your home directory. This tool helps you manage
  that.
• Devel::Trace for easy
  debugging fun. You can use it as a command-line option instead of adding
  print statements into your code.
• pmtools for finding
  out information about installed perl modules. pminst will search
  for modules matching the given search string, pmpath will locate
  a module for you, and there are other options available as well.

Sadly there isn’t an entry for every day this year, but you can always check
out the archives for the
days without a modern one. There’s also a collection of advent
bookmarks available to look through, including the interesting Sysadmin Advent Calendar
articles.

Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of “Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach” (Apress, 2009).

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