Purging old systems from Red Hat Satellite

I've been involved in a Red Hat Satellite (version 5) project recently.

The nature of the client's work meant that most the systems registered with Satellite were reinstalled regularly. This can lead to duplicate systems residing in Satellite's database and its collection of Cobbler files. With the aid of Red Had I wrote some scripts that use the Satellite and Cobbler API to delete old systems from Satellite and Cobbler. I can't share the scripts, but I can show you some useful snippets from what I learned. The scripts are in Perl so I include the snippets in my personal Perl cheatsheet