use Perl

Recently I've started getting more and more into automating tasks I do at work. Part of this is relates around some ideas I've had about shell use and ssh key generation, distribution, and keyhost networks.

I also recently started doing administration work for a free shell box service (metawire.org) and we need a nice way to distribute user accounts across some new machines we're getting in the next week or so.

So to implement the above, I need some way to easily manipulate user and group accounts on various flavors of UNIX. "Well," says I, I says, "I'll just check out CPAN. Surely, it being CPAN, which is for Perl, there will be many modules already written to deal with this stuff, since it much be such a common requirement."

My searching skills are either woefully pathetic, or there just isn't a nice generic module for dealing with user administration.

So I think, "Well, that's ok, I'll just start a nice generic module, write the OS-specific stuff I need, and other people can add stuff. Shouldn't be too hard."

So I look around some more, and discover and mdxi refers to as "one of the most spectacular abuses of CPAN and it's top-level namespace ever."

What the shizzy, yo:
http://search.cpan.org/~tbone/User-1.6/User.pm

That is 16 lines of code. I'm still pretty pissed about this.

So I suppose I'll just use "User::Accounts" or something along those lines. But really. What the hell?

rjbs pointed this out to me:
http://search.cpan.org/~vidul/Linux-usermod-0.3/usermod.pm

Seems okay for what it does, but not what I need, really.

So, whinging aside: Am I totally missing something incredibly obvious? It astounds me that there isn't a generic user admin package written, so I'm pretty sure I must just be being completely blind here.