Perl and Unix Process Accounting

[SparkeyG]

For the prupose of balancing long running applications over a pool machines, I've decided to use unix process accounting to give me data as to each user's impact on the machine. I will use this data then to even out the impact of the x many users over y machines.

After a cursery search, I was unable to find any perl modules that manipulate or utilize the data generated by acct. Do they exsist?

Does anyone here have expierence using pacct and it's children? Am I barking up the wrong tree you think? And how can I use perl to best leverage this data?

--SparkeyG

[joealba]

Rather than dropping little code bits on you, I HIGHLY recommend that you take a look at Perl for System Administration. The fourth chapter is titled User Activity, and at a glance, it seems to have lots of tips pertaining to your question.

Good luck!

Update: Okay, maybe that 'glance' should have been longer... I haven't found much for pacct interfaces in Perl, but Proc::ProcessTable looks like it may be of some help to you.