[rbanffy]

> We were talking about programmatically editing here.

I am not sure it's a good idea. Just generating the files from a CMDB and placing them in the servers seems the simplest approach. I do it. This way I have the nice side effect that anything a sysadmin did directly and manually on the server bypassing the config database (something that shouldn't really be done) gets wiped out as soon as possible.

> in bash

Almost every Unix out there has Python, Perl and Ruby already installed. You don't need to use bash unless you really want it.