I tried writing some code to powerdown our Solaris and SunOS machines using system("init","5"). It worked fine w/ Solaris, but (1) SunOS doesn't use init cmds, (2) there is not a way to power down SunOS from cmd line. So I had to get craftier. What I found, was that by using fork, I could spawn a child, issue and shutdown -h command and kill the child.

There are no deep revelations here, but is a handy snippet for other SAs stuck in the world SunOS.

bb 

if ($OS =~ /5\.[678]/) {
    Shutdown("$Hostname", "/usr/sbin/init 5");
} elsif ($OS =~ /4\.1\./) {
    Shutdown("$Hostname", "/usr/etc/shutdown -h now");

sub Shutdown {
    my ($host, $cmd, $pid);
    ($host, $cmd) = @_; 
    my (@entry, $newentry);
    print LOG "Alert: $IP is shutting down\n"; 
    unless ($pid = fork) {
        unless (fork) {
            exec("$Rsh", "$host", "$cmd");
            exit 0;
        }
    exit 0
    }
    waitpid($pid,0);
    return;
}

[download]

Back to Cool Uses for Perl