Being on site at a clients, I have been hired to do KSH scripting and Oracle SQL loader, but I have discovered that Perl is being used in the background quite extensively.
I have discovered that one of the software packages used by the client is written in perl, and that the vendor's people that they have on site aren't perl programmers.
It also became apparent that the sysadmin guys have had some difficulty with the installation - it seems that the vendor has build Perl on their boxes and shipped the binaries (HP-UX platform with DBI and DBD::Oracle).
Unfortunately, the installation is looking for Oracle paths in a special place, not $ORACLE_HOME much to the chagrin of the sysadmins who are blocking this non-standard configuration in system test and production.
/me comes to the rescue and offers to sort the problems out so that the client has a Perl built on their system - except that this needs to be approved by the infrastructure project manager (is this a valid use of my time?).
Having made the offer, I wait and see what happens, albeit that the client has a semi-crippled Perl installation in that it cannot be extended with XS modules.
