I think that doing the exercises in Learning Perl is a very good way to start. If you don't have the book, get it; if you already have it, give it another chance.

It was easy for me to learn Perl because I started using it from day 1 at work. (It helped that my OS was some Unix flavor or other, so Perl fit right in.) I wrote hundreds of short (10-50 line) scripts, mostly for munging text files and analyzing their contents. First I wrote these scripts for my work, but then cow-orkers who were amazed at the magical powers of Perl (and too lazy to learn it themselves) started asking me to write scripts for them.

So I would recommend starting small with simple munging scripts, and work your way up to full-blown applications. The project that you're setting yourself to do seems to me a bit ambitious, unless you have a lot of non-Perl programming experience in that area already. If the latter is the case, you may be able to get something to work using recipes from The Perl Cookbook, but sooner or later you will have to buckle down and learn the basics.

1. create a script that reads commands from a local file and just echo'es them back to STDOUT
2. create a script that connects via SSH to *one* remote host and does something simple (like ls the current directory). Take a look at Net::SSH.
3. combine 1 and 2
4. create a script based upon 3 that doesn't hard code a remote host but uses addresses read from a file.

Thanks all for the replies. I do have some background in programming, so most of the basics seem to fit right in with perl very well. Since I last posted, I've had a little bit of time to sit down and write up some code... Below is what I have so far.. now to add the SSH code.

open(FWS,"firewalls.txt") || die "Unable to load firewall list: $!";

while (<FWS>) {
      chomp;
      print $_;
      open(CMDS,"commands.txt") || die "Unable to load commands list: 
+$!";

      while (<CMDS>) {
            chomp;
            print $_;
      } 
      close CMDS;
}

close FWS;
[download]

Just a FYI (not that it's better to do this). print defaults to $_ so sayin print $_ is the same as saying print

It makes it more cryptic really, so it's not neccessarily better to do that.. just a FYI

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Grygonos