This page contains the links for a project I did in the Perl programming language to help the librarian at my children's school reconcile the list of students in her database with the list of students in school's central database.

This program has no GUI front end. Since it is completely command line driven, you must be familiar with the CMD window in MS-Windows or a Unix-style shell such as MKS or bash. You will also need to install the Perl program itself to use mine.

This contains the directions for using the program. As always, however, believe the code, not the documentation.

This is the Perl program.  This worked well enough for me to get the job done, but as you will see by the comments, there is more I'd like to do.

This is the test suite.  It's a self-extracting Bourne shell script that contains the program and a little test harness.  It is by no means exhaustive - there are many more tests I'd like to add (...if I only had the time...).  You can view the file in your browser first, then Select All, Copy and Paste into a word processor.  Then save the file in a (preferably empty) directory and run it from a Unix-like shell (which will "unpack" it).   You can then run:

./runtests

You should see output like this:

[D:/Installs/dmu_test] ./runtests
Running all tests in -> D:/Installs/dmu_test
......
FAIL: D:/Installs/dmu_test/tests/expect_to_fail/zcmd 
0006 tests passed
0001 tests failed

Note that there should be one failure - this "tests" the testing system itself.  You will get more failures if you are not running on Windows because error messages are different between Windows and Unix.  You can compare the zbaseline and zoutput files to verify this.

These are the instructions for using Appleworks (instead of the Perl program) to do the merge.  My goal here was to hand off the project to the school librarian, once I had done the major cleanup using the Perl script.

Last Modified: Monday, September 11, 2000