Eric’s Blog

December 28th, 2007 by eric

I came across a situation where I needed to access the process table in Perl. The problem that i found was that the best accessor Proc::ProcessTable only retrieved an array. Since it seems fairly senseless to keep looping over an array to find the exact process id that I want, you may want to turn it into a hash.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Proc::ProcessTable;

 # Create a new process table object
 my ($pt) = new Proc::ProcessTable;

 # Initialize your process table hash
 my (%pt_hash);

 # Get the fields that your architecture supports
 my (@fields) = $pt->fields;

 # Outer loop for each process id
 foreach my $proc ( @{$pt->table} ) {
    # Inner loop for each field within the process id
    for my $field (@fields) {
       # Add the field to the hash
       $pt_hash{$proc->pid}{$field} = $proc->$field();
    }
 }

It’s just as simple as that. If you want to be sure that its in there. At the end of the file add these two lines for proof:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \%pt_hash;

The hash is organized with the keys being the process ids. There is another hash underneath it with all the fields as hash keys.

March 15th, 2007 by eric

Description: File::ReadBackwards works similar to the linux shell command tac. It reads the file line by line strarting from the end of the file.

CPAN: File::ReadBackwards

Example 1:
Being a System’s Administrator, I am usually doing some analysis on a large logfile. Therefore, I may not need all the information contained in the log. This may be especially true if the logs only get rotated once a day or once a week and I don’t need all the information in the log file. Using File::ReadBackwards in combination with a date and time calculation module, I can take only the amount of time I want to use from the logs and then stop processing there. Since we aren’t covering the date calculations here, I will push those out to another subroutine that we will assume works.

# Always use these
use strict;
use warnings;

# Use the module itself
use File::ReadBackwards;

# Define the log file to be read
my $log = "/var/log/log_file";

# Open the logfile by tie'ing it to the module
tie *LOG, "File::ReadBackwards", "$log"
   or die ("$log tie error: $!");

# Iterate over the logfile
while (my $line = ) {

  # Split the log line
  my @entry = split(/\s+/, $line);

  # Take the timestamp and check if we
  #   have hit our threshold yet
  # Break loop if we have
  last if (time_reached($entry[0]) == 1);
}

# Cleanup
untie (*LOG);

March 9th, 2007 by eric

Description: The author of this module notes that it is best used, especially by him, when reading or manipulating log files. I have a tendency to use it for the exact same thing, especially when looking for context around captured lines.

CPAN: File::Bidirectional

Note:
Although I would like to note that using the tie’d interface as I have done takes approximately 2 1/2 times as long as a regular file read according to benchmarks, it is still a very handy tool and allows one not to reinvent the wheel.

Example 1:
Here we are going to go through a log file and when we hit the time stamp we want, we are going to change directions and go back through. There is no real reason to change direction here, I am merely demonstrating how it would be accomplished.

# Always use these
use strict;
use warnings;

# Use the module itself
use File::Bidirectional;

# Define the log file to be read
my $log = "/var/log/log_file";

# Open the logfile by tie'ing it to the module
#  This is exactly the same as File::ReadBackwards
tie *LOG, "File::Bidirectional", "$log", {mode => 'backward'}
   or die ("$log tie error: $!");

# Iterate over the logfile
while (my $line = ) {

  # Split the log line
  my @entry = split(/\s+/, $line);

  # Take the timestamp and check if we
  #   have hit our threshold yet
  # Get the line # then change direction
  if (time_reached($entry[0]) == 1) {
    $line_num = (tied *LOG)->line_num();
    (tied *LOG)->switch();
  }
}

# Cleanup
untie (*LOG);