Windows Admin and Perl

Since I just got done with my Associates Degree, I needed something to keep me busy in the evenings before I get started with my Bachelors.

I've always wished there was a better way to manage server logs and I figured Perl would be the best way to do this. Everyone tells me that I should learn Perl and there have been several tasks where knowing Perl would have been a huge advantage.

Searching around a bit I found a Microsoft site that would help me get started sorting out my logs.

Here is is for everyone else. Looks like a great resource for m$ admins who know (or like me... are learning) Perl.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scr...l/default.mspx

I should now be well on my way to grabbing all my logs and sorting them into an easy to read format and waiting for me when I get into work. I always hated connecting to each server looking through endless entries looking for certain events.

If anyone has any more good resources, please do post them. :)

Looks like these are going to be of great help too....

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=re...EJDI-QHPpsiPDg
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=re...EJDI-QHPpsiPDg

Phishy, I haven't looked at the link, but I been telling you for the longest a little bit of coding never hurt anyone. I am an avid perl lover, it is by far my favorite language... Though I will be honest C++ is it's bastard step child in my view, I still love C++ but not in the same way...

Regex in perl makes everything so simple... I kid you not, once you learn perl you can be as anal as you want to be with logs, you an setup a regex string that runs through all your logs and checks for everything that happened at say... 10:45 for a month, then pull that out and run another string on it....

I tell you, perl is lovely... The simplistic nature of the language is great, but don't be fooles as easy as the begining stuff in perl is, the more advance stuff can make the most hardcore coder look and say WTF!!!

Well, there is my perl whine for the day... I am going to go back and hide in my hole.

Phishy, let me know through AIM or whatever if you need some perl stuff, I have plenty of ebooks. Enough to keep your nights filled with regex, and tildes.

Hi phishphreek80,

You might want to also check this out, I posted it awhile ago...

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=268961
AntiOnline - Programming Information/Tutorial Sites

Eg ;)

http://www.awprofessional.com/bookst...321200985&rl=1 - good book on windows forensics and teaches you how to do the work with perl.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/ - good book on using perl on win32 systems.

Phish:

Perl ROCKS! I swear by it. Use it to do most of all my automated tasks system-admin wise as well as security. I use ActiveState Perl for Windows - it has bunches of built in modules which work with Windows.

Now I'm definitely no advanced programmer/coder but do have some form training (Pascal, Cobol yuck, BASIC, etc) and fair amount of scripting experience, but I put together a quick cheatsheet which is use when developing Perl scripts. Just like many things, there's more than one way to achieve the tasks I perform with this code and probably shorter/quicker code that performs the same as mine but mine works.

Here's my cheatsheet.

Thanks for the replies. I've been trying to set aside a couple of hours in the evening to go through examples and read up on Perl as much as I can. I have more than enough books/ebooks from what I can tell. I have the Oreily Perl set and I have a Perl by Example book by Ellie Quigley. I've got so many ebooks I don't even know what is there.

Thanks for the online links. I'll check them out later this evening and same with the cheat sheet. :)