This could be a bother to write in any other language, but Perl makes it so easy that it would be silly not to build it. It is a simple tool.
It does only this: Grab the web page containing the load stats on the login machines at my university. Select the server with lowest load and launch ssh.
I for one feel taht this is the biggest use for Perl. Those small nice hacks that just make life a bit... smoother. Imagine how long this little widget would be written in any other language.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
if ( $#ARGV != 0 ) {
 print "efd v1.0 by d99msr\n";
 print "Usage:\n";
 print "        efd username\n";
 exit;
}
my $user = $ARGV[0];
use HTTP::Request::Common;
use LWP::UserAgent;
print "Retrieving and parsing load average stats.\n";
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $req = GET 'http://www.efd.lth.se/loginload.shtml';
my @raw = split("\n", $ua->request($req)->as_string);
my $lowest = 10;
my $machine;
foreach (@raw) {
 if ( $_ =~ m/TR.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TD.*TR/)
+ {
  $_ =~ s/\<.*?\>\<.*?\>/\<\>/ig;
  $_ =~ s/ //g;
  @split = split("<>", $_);
  if ( $split[5] < $lowest ) {
   $lowest = $split[5];
   $machine = $split[1];
  }
 }
}
print "Connecting to $machine, load average: $lowest\n";
my $efdname = "$user\@$machine.efd.lth.se";
exec("ssh $efdname");
exit;
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Odie

--
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