For checking if a group exists you can use getgrnam (scalar getgrnam("foo") — returns the GID, or undef if a group of the given name doesn't exist).

For creating a new group, I'd use the respective command supplied by your system, such as groupadd (call it via system) — there's no reason to reinvent the wheel and run into various gotchas that can be avoided by using existing tools.

It seems groupadd already does everything the OP wants: if the group doesn't exist, it adds it - if it does exist, it prints a message it already exists.

Looks to me the OP just wants a three line shell script. Doesn't seem worth the trouble of writing a Perl wrapper for that.

Thanks for the help guys it worked for me.

To have the script run as root, you either need to be root when you execute it (or from root's crontab), or use sudo when the script is executed.

As almut said, use system commands for most of the work. Just plan out how you would do it on the command line, then wrap those commands in Perl using one of the many methods (system, exec, backticks)... which one you use depends on various things, like do you want the script to wait for that command to finish before continuing, etc. You can read up on those commands just about everywhere. The easiest way is to google 'perl <command>'.

Hi, I got it. but I want my script just take group id (not group name) and if it exists then run chgrp,chmod g+s command as root.Basically my script is running under my cronjob but to run chmod , chgrp I need to become "root" first. so how should I do that

abhishek~/perl ~> cat grp.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
$in=<STDIN>;
($name, $passwd, $gid, $members) = getgrgid($in);
print "group name: $name \t group id: $gid \n";
if ( $in == $gid )
{
print "Success\n";
#how to become "root" here..
exec ("chgrp -R $gid /home/abhishek/cpp") || die "could not do chgrp $
+!";

}
else
{
print "Group id does not exists, you need to give the existing group i
+d \n";
}
abhishek~/perl ~>
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