The purpose of sanity.pl is to be an extremely flexible tool for determining the ’sanity’ of a development, qa or production UNIX/Linux environment. All parameters for a sanity.pl run are passed in via an XML based config file. The tests sanity.pl can perform include:
1. validating the value of an environmental variable
2. validating the existence, mode, owner and group for a specified file or folder
3. invoking an external comand and validating it’s return code
4. performing a regular expression evaluation
5. determining that a Perl module is available
6. validating a Perl object’s methods/module’s functions exist.
The intent is for a UNIX\Linux admin to run sanity.pl after a server admin operation (reboot, upgrade, patch, etc.) has been performed to ensure the expected environment is still sane for development, qa testing, or production application. For enterprise environments where many servers are maintained, sanity.pl can greatly reduce the amount of time an admin spends troubleshooting or performing change management tasks.
