This will ensure that you have a unique UUID when INSERTing the job. But I think that we can do better and this is where the good practice comes into effect (and why the Gearman devs marked it as won’t fix). So let’s think a little more abstractly for a moment. For the uniq key (unique_key column), how about something like “${type}_”.create_uuid_as_string(). This will allow us to group (in this case) our mailing types so that we can monitor the status of our work queue. Yes, we can easily hop into the database and run this query:

But wouldn’t it be nicer to know exactly where we are at with this query:

For reference, here are the unique_key columns that allowed to generate that query:

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By reading the Pod documentation, you’ll also find that you can get a lot more specific. You can add command line switches, lots of performance data, and my favorite, some pretty extensive success, warning or critical messages that can be displayed on the dashboard.

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I noticed that when I tried to read the file (if it already existed), then nothing would be read. I neglected to realize that you must seek to position 0 in the file if you want to read it. Therefore the following code will work:

Although it might seem obvious that you need to be at the beginning of the file to read it forward (and it is), I didn’t realize the file pointer opened a file in append mode to the last position in the file (in hind sight, it does appear to be a bit more obvious).

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This will print:

This neat little method takes advantage of Perl C API’s looks_like_number() function. Since this is virtually native, it will be pretty fast.

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One of the ways to deal with it to to use grep. Since grep returns the number of elements in the array that evaluate to true (when called in a scalar context), I can do the following to make it work:

The reason this works is that when called in the scalar context, grep only returns the number of elements that evaluate to true. Since there are 3 elements in the array, the return value is greater than 2, then the entire expression evaluates to true. This is not only a lot easier to read and a lot cleaner to write, but it makes for easy additions to the conditional testing if necessary. Although changing the context in which functions are called is common, it is easily forgotten. Grep called in scalar context can be easily manipulated (as above) to add readability to your program.

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I had a little trouble finding out how to fix this. So I am posting this here in case it helps someone else out. It was a simple fix (since CPAN doesn’t work) that you have to do by hand. Go to the CPAN site and download dist IO here. Download and untar it and run the following commands:

This should fix your Perl install. It also ended up that I had to run CPAN and reinstall Scalar::Util and Storable.

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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.

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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);

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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);

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CPAN: Mail::IMAPClient

Example 1:
Creating a connection to an IMAP server isn’t complicated. And once you are connected there are many things that you can do to manipulate messages. In this first example, I am merely going to show you how to connect to the mail server and download ALL the messages in specific folders:

# Always be safe
use strict;
use warnings;

# Use the module
use Mail::IMAPClient;

 $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new( Server  => 'mail.server.com:143',
                                User    => 'me',
                              Password  => 'mypass')
        # module uses eval, so we use $@ instead of $!
        or die "IMAP Failure: $@";

 foreach my $box qw( HAM SPAM ) {
   # Which file are the messages going into
   my $file = "mail/$box";

   # Select the mailbox to get messages from
   $imap->select($box)
        or die "IMAP Select Error: $!";

   # Store each message as an array element
   my @msgs = $imap->search('ALL')
        or die "Couldn't get all messages\n";

   # Loop over the messages and store in file
   foreach my $msg (@msgs) {
     # Pipe msgs through 'formail' so they are stored properly
     open my $pipe, "| formail >> $file"
       or die("Formail Open Pipe Error: $!");

     # Send msg through file pipe
     $imap->message_to_file($pipe, $msg);

     # Close the messgae pipe
     close $pipe
       or die("Formail Close Pipe Error: $!");
   }

   # Close the folder
   $imap->close($box);
 }

 # We're all done with IMAP here
 $imap->logout();

Example 2:
In this next example, we are going to take advantage of some other methods that are provided by this useful little module. We will begin by using the same base as is in Example 1, but we will add some nuances in the middle for functionality.

Note: Messages don’t get immediately deleted with IMAP, only marked for deletion. They aren’t actually deleted until the box is expunged. In this case, it gets done after the looping over each mailbox is complete. This is to say that if the program gets interrupted in the middle that the messages won’t be deleted until the mailbox is officially issued an expunge command.

# Always be safe
use strict;
use warnings;

# Use the module
use Mail::IMAPClient;

 $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new( Server  => 'mail.server.com:143',
                                User    => 'me',
                              Password  => 'mypass')
        # module uses eval, so we use $@ instead of $!
        or die "IMAP Failure: $@";

 foreach my $box qw( HAM SPAM ) {
   # How many msgs are we going to process
   print "There are ". $imap->message_count($box).
          " messages in the $box folder.\n";

   # Which file are the messages going into
   my $file = "mail/$box";

   # Select the mailbox to get messages from
   $imap->select($box)
        or die "IMAP Select Error: $!";

   # Store each message as an array element
   my @msgs = $imap->search('ALL')
        or die "Couldn't get all messages\n";

   # Loop over the messages and store in file
   foreach my $msg (@msgs) {
     # Pipe msgs through 'formail' so they are stored properly
     open my $pipe, "| formail >> $file"
       or die("Formail Open Pipe Error: $!");

     # Skip the msg if its over 100k
     if ($imap->size($msg) > 100000) {
       $imap->delete_message($msg);
       next;
     }

     # Send msg through file pipe
     $imap->message_to_file($pipe, $msg);

     # Close the messgae pipe
     close $pipe
       or die("Formail Close Pipe Error: $!");

     # Delete each message after downloading
     $imap->delete_message($msg);

     # If we are just testing and want to leave
     #  leave the messages untouched, then we
     #  can use the following line of code
     # $imap->deny_seeing($msg);
   }

   # Expunge and close the folder
   $imap->expunge($box);
   $imap->close($box);
 }

 # We're all done with IMAP here
 $imap->logout();

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