Re: best way to express an 'editfiles' idiom?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, eric@explosive.net wrote:
> Personally, I greatly prefer to use 'copy' for any of this
> configuration management work. After a couple of attempts to work
> out how to do tasks that seemed straightforward to me inside
> 'editfiles' and ending up with baroque hacks that failed, I became
> disillusioned with the idea of editing files in-place with cfengine.
> 
> With some hierarchy to the file selection in cfengine
> (everyone->computers like me-> my hostname) and some version control
> on the repository, this turns out to have several advantages over
> 'editfiles'

You will almost definitely be interested in cfperl:

http://lifelogs.com/cfperl

cfperl does Perl-based in-place file editing, can do very complex file
hierarchies, and a bunch of other cool things (crontab editing, user
management).

cfperl also tries to be compatible with the cfengine groups, so you
can include your groups file and all your group definitions will work.
I specifically wrote cfperl to overcome the cfengine limitations you
mention above.

Ted