Here is essentially what I am doing... I have been charged with the task of unifying all local login information for about 300 Unix machines. This means UID's, GID's, etc... What I have done, is created a perl script, that will harvest all the lines in /etc/passwd (this will be adapted for shadow and group as well - it's only a matter of changing the source to the file handle) - and then map them using a key=>value pair of the username=>line_in_passwd. I then use a simple while loop to parse each value, split it into the actual data (sans :), and use a DBI call to place it into a MySQL DB, along with the current working hostname. I have also populated an array with the usernames, the idea being that if a key matches an entry in the array, the DB already contains the info for that user/host pair, and it should branch to then check the values of that user, to ensure nothing has changed. As of now, it does not branch, I have been simply playing with the logic to ensure that if the statement is true, it will. Here is a snippet of that logic block. Please excuse the syntax...for I am nowhere near as effective yet as I would like to be :) 
CHILD:while( (my $key, my $value) = each %passwd){
        for(@existing_users){next CHILD if /$key/;}
        $value =~ /\w*:(.*):(\d*):(\d*):(.*):(.*):(.*)/;
        my $query = "INSERT INTO passwd (username, pwd_loc, uid, gid, 
+gecos, home_dir, shell, hostname) values('$key', '$1', '$2', '$3', '$
+4', '$5', '$6', '$hostname')";
        my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
        $sth->execute() || die("Couldn't exec sth!");
    }

[download]
The next CHILD if statement will be replaced with a subroutine to check for differences if I can get this right. My thought, regarding the hash order, was to see if there may be a better way to scan that hash for an existing user entry in the DB. And just by the way - I know that you Monks are huge advocates of using .pm's. There may indeed be one out there that I could adapt for this, however, being as new as I am to both Perl, and programming in general, it's in my best interest to reinvent the wheel :) Thanks again for the help Monks.

In reply to Re^2: Determining hash order for sorting array by PenguinPwrdBox
in thread Determining hash order for sorting array by PenguinPwrdBox

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