Why bother with the rewrite? It wasn't broken, so there wasn't much to gain, not even in running time.

Furthermore, there's a lot more that you could have improved. Why are you parsing a password file yourself? That's why you have getpwent. And what's the point of storing all the existing usernames in a hash? A single call with getpwnam could have told whether a name was free or not.

Finally, this program seems to favour reusing userids over issueing unused ones. Reusing userids is not considered a good thing - a new user might inherit files and other pieces of history from a previous user. It's better to just pass over all the entries, remember the highest issued id, and use the next one available.

And if you really wanted to impress your boss, you would have replaced the program with a one liner: 

    exec useradd => @ARGV

[download]
Or, if you are on Linux, and really want a question and answer session: 
    exec 'adduser'

[download]
Of course, I would have replaced it with a 0 liner, and used the already available tools.

Abigail

In reply to Re: So you know Perl; but do you know programming? by Abigail-II
in thread So you know Perl; but do you know programming? by Marza

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