What do you do when the auditors are breathing down your neck, wanting to see an exhaustive report on the Windows network security of a 2,000-user network across eight sites? That's easy. Break out a text editor and start writing some Perl. That's what my colleague Matt Prigge and I did when we were tasked with locating every share available on a network and documenting who had access to their files. At first blush, it was a Herculean effort. When we started coding and the pieces began to fall into place, however, it became much simpler.

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