An email enquirer wrote:

I have an interview coming up and have been asked to give 10 minute  talk on the following.

<quote>
Given content in a Content Management System, without using any export functionality of the CMS, extract the content to a staging server.
>From the staging server, get the content live.  

No use of FTP or sFTP(Secure FTP) is allowed. The ownership of the files must not be that of the web server.  (i.e. not webserv or nobody)
</quote>

I would have used NET::SFTP by default on something like this, however it seems this is not allowed. Am I cheating if I use secure copy, this  uses the same public/private key system as SSH so it's pretty secure.

Or should I use something like LWP to move it around, but this would only work if the server that holds the file is webfacing.

Either way, I'm a bit confused as to why they would not allow sftp and what alternatives there are instead, am I missing something?.

Question / thought.  What role is the interview for?  Does that give you a clue?  Have you though of file sharing Samba / NFS / AFS to transfer the data around (if it's a more systems admin-y job), or things like rcp and tar commands (which you can give a target host?).   It may be more that they want than a Perl program.  Or if you have the time to DISCUSS you could raise both options and impress them with a choice ...

Perhaps the content is in a relational database or XML?   Other options  there;  indeed, I had to move a bulleting board with 6 Mbytes of data  in it a few weeks ago, and the only tools I had were PHP or Perl programs on the web server.   Wrote a script to analyse / return all the content of the MySQL database, and another to re-create it on the new machine. Lot of initial testing, then transfer was done in half an hour.

I guess that the biggest clue on what they want is what they're interviewing you for, and what their business is ...

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