Today's Small Victory: I'm working in a shop that is, at best, Perl neutral. A few folks are downright Perl hostile. The occasional win helps chip away at some of that hostility.

The problem: We use proprietary software that requires a license server, which runs on a Unix box. Each copy of this proprietary beast eats up one floating license. Developers often find it convenient to run multiple copies. We often see a "Hey, I can't get a license!" email, followed by a cubicle-by-cubicle search. It's possible to telnet in to the Unix and issue a set of commands to get a list of license holders, but few people have accounts. Wouldn't it be great if there was a web page that listed floating licenses?

By policy, the license server box doesn't run a web server. But it does have Perl installed. I have a web server running on my desktop... {Idea!} Grab the Perl Cookbook, borrow a few lines of IO::Socket-based TCP server code, and arrange for it to run the commands to report on licenses and pump the results out the socket. Then make a CGI by borrowing a few lines of TCP client code, pointing it at my tiny server on the license manager machine, and wrapping the results in simple HTML. Now people can hit a page on my server and instantly see who holds licenses.

Total code: 32 lines.
Elapsed time: 12 minutes.
Response from the Perl haters: Cool!

What "small victories" have you had with Perl lately?

In reply to Small Victories for Perl by dws

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