Despite my limited knowledge of both subjects, I have been asked to give a 3-day course "Unix and Perl for Beginners" for some of my cow-orkers. I was thinking of looking at problems such as Untangling Log Files, seeing what sort of simple, ad hoc approaches a Unix shell such as bash might offer, and then develoing a nice Perl solution.

What I need are a few more ideas, besides the one mentioned above, for suitable problems. Other than dealing with huge, incomprehensible log files on a daily basis, my cow-orkers also have to grub about in rather large databases and tweak data. In addition they use a complex build process which is controlled by setting dozens of environment variables.

I had a look at the 99 Problems in Perl6, but they are rather too rarified for my purposes. I'm looking for something more along the lines of "Plenty of Practical Perl Problems" but maybe it is expecting a little too much to find many problems that are both somehow generic and at the same time specific enough for the solution to be a stand-alone utility.

Any ideas?

Update: I should have said that my cow-orkers are developing and/or testing software (not written in Perl) and need Unix and Perl to paper over the cracks in the various processes.

loris