The Perl extensions to extended accounting provide a Perl interface to the underlying libexacct(3LIB) API and offer the following enhancements.
Full equivalence to C API provide a Perl interface that is functionally equivalent to the underlying C API.
The interface provides a mechanism for accessing exacct files that does not require C coding. All the functionality that is available from C is also available by using the Perl interface.
Ease of use.
Data obtained from the underlying C API is presented as Perl data types. Perl data types ease access to the data and remove the need for buffer pack and unpack operations.
Automated memory management.
The C API requires that the programmer take responsibility for managing memory when accessing exacct files. Memory management takes the form of passing the appropriate flags to functions, such as ea_unpack_object(3EXACCT), and explicitly allocating buffers to pass to the API. The Perl API removes these requirements, as all memory management is performed by the Perl library.
Prevent incorrect use of API.
The ea_object_t structure provides the in-memory representation of exacct records. The ea_object_t structure is a union type that is used for manipulating both Group and Item records. As a result, an incorrectly typed structure can be passed to some of the API functions. The addition of a class hierarchy prevents this type of programming error.