Ditto. Congratulations for wanting to learn Perl, it is good for all Perl people to have more Perl people in general. Especially if you become a good coder and contribute something to CPAN that is useful, which is likely if you are an active sysadmin.

That said, I do find it a bit amusing that you ask for help while stressing how fantastic a sysadmin you are when maybe a third of the people here are too. And thanks for your email, but you won't probably get any emailed replies..

You can be a sysadmin and code. Though maybe you could be a better sysadmin by *reading* more. If I was to say one thing is most important about being a good X in computers, especially Perl, is you have to read and try to figure it out. Also I think while not absolutely essential, linux is a good place to do the experimentation because it has less barriers to doing useful things, and more free tools, plus it will help get you to pry into things and make sure they work the way they are supposed to, instead of getting too cozy with standing an armlength away from what's going on as usually in Windows. However it will take a good part of your time to learn linux too. Perl and Linux both reward effort.

So I think you are starting out with a need for some philosophy. Not to be personal about it, but I would think twice before hiring a sysadmin who could not install perl and run a few simple programs with it, and came running to the discussion boards right away before doing some reading of the installation guides, tutorials, and FAQs. Also you apparently did not format your post with HTML tags as we all do.

I think the same kind of proactive (shall we say determined or obsessed?) attitude, and a cheap Internet connection, are the best tools you will have to learning perl. There are resources about systems administration with Perl, but I would start just getting into some basics first. perl.org, perldoc.com, search.cpan.org are good places to look at. PM is also good, for example variations of your question have been asked umpteen times.. though I think people like answering each time here. My recommendation is to start with the perlfaqs and some overviews, and take a look at related posts here to see how people think about solving problems in Perl. This will be more rewarding in the long run than just memorizing cae-by-case formulas from those Perl in umpteen hours books. Oh yeah, Learning Perl is supposed to be pretty good too.

Keep at it!

Matt

P.S. If on Windows, upload via FTP as Type ASCII, since carriage returns may cause your script not to execute. As mentioned in the faqs.