For the first half-

It is Perl standard and generally easier on the eyes. Plus you don't end up with ambiguous, randomly cased bastards resulting from case collisions like IDXML, IdXML, IdXml, pHURI, PHURI, pHUri, etc, and so on and so forth.

Light weight OO is a neat solution for this. Consider:

use strict;
use warnings;


my $obj = bless {};
my $verb = 'AddAccount';

for my $os (qw(SUN HP XP)) {
    my $sub = $obj->can ("${os}AddAccount");
    
    if (! $sub) {
        print "Don't know how to $verb for $os\n";
    } else {
        $sub->($obj);
    }
}


sub LINUXAddAccount {
    my ($self) = @_;
    
    print "Linux goes moo\n";
}


sub AIXAddAccount {
    my ($self) = @_;
    
    print "AIX goes moo\n";
}


sub HPAddAccount {
    my ($self) = @_;
    
    print "HP goes moo\n";
}


sub SUNAddAccount {
    my ($self) = @_;
    
    print "SUN goes moo\n";
}
[download]

Prints:

SUN goes moo
HP goes moo
Don't know how to AddAccount for XP
[download]

Note that all you need do to support XPAddAccount is add the sub - no tables to update or any other code changes required.

If you're using OO, go the whole way and use polymorphism. Create a subclass for SunOS, one for HPUX, one for XP, one for Linux, and then call add_account on each object.

I like this!!

Just one question, how would I call the sub with parameters? Like if I wanted it to say "AIX goes $what\n";, how would I send the $what to the subroutine... I hope that makes sense.

perlboot

BEGIN {
    package Foo;
    sub new { return bless {}, shift }
    sub method {
        my( $self, $what ) = @_;
        print  "AIX goes $what\n";
    }
}
my $obj = Foo->new;
$obj->method('the what');
__END__
AIX goes the what
[download]

perlsub

I prefer constants to be all caps, OO Classes to be mixed, and pretty much everything else to be all lower. Maybe more caps for global data, but generally speaking I avoid it.

Regardless of case, that is a horrible mismatch. SUN and HP refer to companies, and AIX refers to an OS from IBM. I guess Linux could go either way The hobgoblins in my mind would like some consistency here. I'd go with OS over company (ie Sun => Solaris, HP => HP-UX) but that is your call.

As for question #2, why not simply add_account($server) and have that call get_os_type()? Doesn't this solve the problem by only exposing a single prototype that works for all OS types?