So, you have your LDAP server all set up and purring along happily — great! You can if you want perform all your interactions with LDAP — adding, deleting, and modifying records — by writing LDIF files and using the command line commands. And sometimes that’s fine. But it can also be very useful to be able to script those interactions: for example, to create a script which will take arguments and then add a new user. What you need at this point is perl-ldap — a collection of Perl modules providing an OO interface to LDAP servers. Unlike some other perl/LDAP implementations, perl-ldap doesn’t require a C compiler, but runs as straight perl, making it more cross-platform compatible. It is under active development, and a reasonably recent version is available packaged for most distros (e.g. libnet-ldap-perl for Debian/Ubuntu). Or you can install it from CPAN with the command perl -m CPAN -e "install perl-ldap". In the following, I’ll construct a script to add a new user. I’ll assume that you’re familiar with basic perl programming and with perl OO — there are plenty of resources available online if not. I’m also not going to give the command-line parsing parts — assume that any undeclared variables have been taken from the command line! I also haven’t tackled the business of authentication, which may be needed for the parts of this which go beyond just searching.
Making a connection
Net::LDAP and Net::LDAPS are the modules which handle connecting and…
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