Re: Seeking guidance for more idiomatic way of (re)writing this script.

[Athanasius]

Two suggestions:

1. Wherever possible, avoid scattering hardcoded constants throughout the code. Instead, aim to make the script easily configurable. As a first step, move any data which could change into a hash:

   my %config
   (
       smtp_destination  => 'mail.server.com',
       nas_array_ip_list => 'C:/path/to/nas_array_ip_list.txt',
       smtp_msg_from     => '[e-mail]',
       smtp_msg_to       => '[e-mail]',
       mail_file         => 'C:/path/to/dmcheck.txt',
       username          => 'username',
       password          => 'password',
       reason            => '/nas/sbin/getreason',
       nasmailmsg_from   => '[e-mail]',
       nasmailmsg_to     => '[e-mail]',
       dm_check          => 'dmcheck.txt',
   );
   

   and access the hash data as needed:

   MIME::Lite->send('smtp', $config{smtp_destination});
   
   if (! open my $fh, '<',  $config{nas_array_ip_list})
   ...
   

   As the next step, you may find it useful to populate the hash by reading in the data from a separate configuration file.

2. Avoid system calls where Perl has equivalent built-in functions. So, replace

   system 'del dmcheck.txt';
   

   with

   unlink $config{dm_check} or warn "Could not unlink file '$config{dm_ch
   +eck}': $!";
   

   See unlink.

Hope that helps,