Yet another not-answering-your-perl-question, but you may be intersted totally ripping the guts out of your existing infrastructure, and changing the uid -> user mappings to be done using LDAP or Yellow Pages/NIS instead of bundles of /etc/passwds.

Ofcourse, you may have already thought of a centralised directory and thrown the idea out because you're on many sites, don't have that many common users accross all boxes, machines run vastly different OS's, your boss won't pay you to do it, etc too

But I did the LDAP thing once, and it was neat, slap in an export of /home, and some ssh keys, and you're away laughing. The place I'm at now uses NIS, and exported homes, but same deal.

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;

In reply to OT: you could use a directory too by f00li5h
in thread trying to decide best data structure for problem at hand. by mikejones

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.